The World in Tonevision

I am now officially a winner! :-)

 Lo and behold, my prize:

Yes, indeed. A lovely pink web-badge. Well worth slaving away for the better part of a month, no?

It has been amazing fun, and the sense of achievement after surpassing the 50 000 word requirement today is completely out of proportion with the fact that large parts of the book is, for lack of a better word, tripe. Now, I don't mean to knock tripe, I actually like it in polish flaki soup for instance, but it's not like I'd pay money for a book on it. If you get my drift.

But I must say, the output improved tremendously towards the end of the writing process, and the fun I had assembling the different storylines into something resembling a unified story was amazing! At the moment I feel like it might actually be worth sitting down and editing the thing. I might actually do it. The aim of course being to write, in the words of Nanowrimo founder Chris Baty "something that won't make people vomit". Friends and family beware if you get a rectangular, flat and sort of stinky christmas-present this year...

Anyhow, it is done, finished, over with, and I can absolutely recommend it to anyone thinking about taking up the challenge next year. Yay!

*toasting self in champagne flavoured soda*

Big.

And not getting any smaller. If the baby arrives according to plan (plan. Ha!) he'll arrive in four weeks exactly. You know when you're seeing a medical professional and they go "hang on a second, I just want to consult with my colleague"? Never a good sign. Apparently it's not only me who is becoming a little too big for comfort. If the belly keeps growing as it has now, the next time I visit the midwife there will be nowhere on the chart to mark the growth. The chart will be used up. She'll have to draw her little circle with an x inside it somewhere else on the page. *sigh* I'm hoping for it to be a simple measuring error, but I'm booked in for (yet) another ultrasound next week to make sure. But if the baby keeps growing at this rate I certainly hope he's not planning to stay in there any longer than necessary.

Efficiency - or the art of not overthinking it

We're in the process of moving house this week. Something I don't exactly love at the best of times, but which is just ridiculously taxing when you're 8 months pregnant, big as a house, working and writing a novel at the same time. But we had movers, so the moving of boxes was as painless and efficient as one could wish for. Due to a temporary lapse of judgement on my part I said "yes, why not?" when they suggested starting the move at 6am tuesday morning rather than ten, which was great for the moving van finding a parking space and for finishing early but not as great for staying on good terms with the neighbours in the place we were moving out from. It was too late by the time I thought of that. But, then again, what can they do? Kick us out? Ha.

Now that the boxes are all moved, all we need to do is to get some furniture (only a sofa, dining room table, bed, cot, six or seven bookshelves, and ten or so other things, nothing much really) from ikea, assemble them (easy-peasy!), and we're officially moved in!

As for electrical goods, we needed a washing machine, a microwave oven after a Very Bad Popcorn Incident with the previous one, and a TV. The latter feels a bit spoilt as I already own a very nice, comfortably lumpy TV with inbuilt quality control (that is, you turn it on, it turns itself off, you turn it on again, it turns itself off again and so on 3-15 times depending on room temperature, as if to say "are you positive you really need to be watching TV at this particular point in time" - which, let's face it, you very rarely really need). But my partner for some reason felt like this was a bit of a nuisance rather than an advantage, so I succumbed and we decided to get one of them fancy new flatscreens that don't take up a whole room to themselves either.

And this is where it gets efficent: due to being tired and pressed for time plus getting a little lost on the way there, we only arrived at the electrical goods store at 19.54 this evening. It closes at 20.00. In those six minutes, we purchased a washing machine, TV and a microwave oven. That's two minutes per purchase. One could argue that it doesn't bode well for the quality control that I haven't even seen the microwave oven, but only said to the helpful clerk that "and lastly, I'll take the cheapest microwave oven you have", but really. Why spend time poring over a decision that you don't really care about? If the TV will show soccer matches, John will be happy. If the micro nukes my oatmeal porridge and pops my popcorn, I don't much care what extra special pizza functions it can oven. And as long as my socks get clean, a washing machine is pretty much a washing machine to me.

I notice a pattern here, the two times in my life I have purchased a vacuum cleaner I have invariably bought the cheapest one available and left the shop within five minutes of entering. It works for me.

Ironically, I can spend hours and hours in almost any bookstore deciding which 10 euro book to buy, and then beat myself up for a long time if I didn't buy the one I should have bought. I suppose it's a matter of choosing one's battles.

NaNoWriMo write-in

Seven days into the NaNoWriMo project, and it's starting to get interesting! The writing itself is one thing. That is interesting,for sure, although whether it's interesting good or interesting bad, I'm hard pressed to tell you at this point. Same goes for the "so, what's the book about?" question. Can't really tell you, and it is can't, not won't. I am following the no plot, no problem - philosophy and started on the first day without even the first idea who my main character would be. Now I've gotten to know her and six or so other characters, and what the story is remains to be seen. Let's just hope there is one.

Apart from the writing itself, it is also starting to get sociable. Over the last week, I've been to no less than three write-ins. One with my writing group, Sjåherresåde!, that I meet to write with biweekly anyway, one with my very good friend Helena who I have also been able to trick into this madness, and one with other NaNoWriMo writers from the Oslo area in Litteraturhuset (as seen in pic below). Nerding together is certainly a very good thing, and something I have been doing too little of. Turns out there are plenty of other people like me out there, and they're friendly, as well. Happy days!

13681 words down, 36319 to go!

Sunday photo walk

After what seems like decades of rain, finally some sun today - perfect for a photowalk with Helena, giving my new lens (the old one having had an unfortunate meeting with the pavement that awful monday morning of the glucose tolerance test) its first proper testrun. The botanical gardens are never a bad place to go in fall, and the lens works splendidly.
 

Apart from getting aquainted with my new lens and enjoying the sun and the company plus keeping me occupied the last day before Nanowrimo, the walk was useful in finding nice places to go out in my new neighbourhood - only two weeks before we move to Grønland now! I must say, the opportunities for homemade cake in quaint surroundings seem abundant - much better than expected! The area also seems stroller-friendly, which is probably the kind of thing I will care about shortly.

Sleep hygiene

is what I am currently performing. It's 3.30 on a sunday morning, and I can assure you it's not like I'm just home from a mad night out or anything. No such luck, I did sleep for three hours or so before the baby decided it was time to have a little swim in the belly, my legs decided it was time to start twitching, some neighbours decided it was time to ramble drunkenly up the stairs, and eventually I myself decided it was time to get up and do something else instead of just savouring the hassle of not being able to go back to sleep.

Something else has thus far consisted of trawling the web for sleep advice for pregnant women, of which there is plenty to be had, all of outstanding quality.

• "Cut down on alcoholic beverages" - Ya think?
• "Have a hot bath" - erm. The last time I checked I'm not allowed to have hot ones?
• "Nap"/"Whatever you do, don't nap" - these pieces of advice both sound very reasonable to me, although maybe not too useful when seen under one.
• "Have a going-to-bed ritual. One example could be brushing your teeth" Brilliant advice, never thougtht of that! Must try. Where can one purchase a toothbrush?
• "Don't look at the time if you can't sleep. Oh, and never stay in bed for more than 20 minutes if you are unable to go back to sleep." Will try. I guess that means the next time I wake up in the middle of the night I should just count to 1.200 before getting out of bed?

My favourite bit of advice is the recurring cheery suggestion at the bottom of all the lists that sleeping in spurts in the third trimester is an excellent opportunity to get used to the altered sleeping patterns that will descend on the household when the baby arrives anyway, and should be cherished. Hooray.

Oh well. NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, so at least I will be able to use the sleepless hours for something constructive.

What a week.

dusty abstract - afternoon sun, originally uploaded by tonbel.

What a week, I have been moaning since wednesday or so. What a week, will it ever end? And now -finally- it is sunday and I will celebrate this fact and my fresh start at midnight by going to bed well before my normal bedtime.

Do you subscribe to the lump theory of life? If you're not familiar with it, here's a brief summary of the lump model: Life is like a carton of curdled milk (or like a glass ketchup bottle, if you find that a less disgusting mental image). You can try pouring carefully, and nothing will really come - maybe a drop or two, but nothing much, and so you pour a little tiny bit more decisively and suddenly everything comes at once, more than you wanted or know what to do with. This has been that week when the floodgates open.

If you have a low tolerance for moaning and self-pity, feel free to skip forward to the last paragraph where I'm bound to have gotten over myself enough to think of a couple of nice things that happened. The rest of you can stay tuned. So, as you'll know if you read my previous rant about glucose tolerance testing, it all started early monday morning. As we know already, I was hungry and I couldn't sleep because of same, and those two factors aren't exactly designed to put me in a great mood, either. Being up at four AM did not prevent me + partner from being a little on the late side and a lot on the stressed side when heading up to the hospital, which incidentally we didn't really know where was (although we did have a map, nerds that we are). So of course at half past seven we were more or less running to the underground while bickering about who should carry what (him being the gentleman and insisting on carrying everything, me being me and wanting to do my share), when suddenly, in the middle of it all, I tripped and fell forward. Right on top of the belly. Right on top of the baby. The three of us were petrified, needless to say. Both of us grown-ups were trying to keep it together and not think about it properly (unsuccessfully of course). The baby stayed completely still, very much unlike himself. Sporting a "the show must go on" attitude, we proceeded up to locate the hospital and lab just in time for my first bloodtest, the baby taking it easy all the while, me still with the shakes. A pint of extremely sugary sugar water later, the baby was back to his normal nudging, kicking self, and I was so relieved I could (and almost did) cry. Nevertheless, his father insisted that I get checked up, which I did, sending my total number of hours spent waiting around in hospitals on monday up to 6 (curiously, for the first time in probably a decade, I had gone somewhere without a book to read, so the hours were spent poring over an ISO standard. Good times). But the baby was absolutely fine. Not so my camera, which for reasons unknown I had also decided to bring along, and which unlike jr. wasn't protected by substantial amounts of flesh and amniotic fluid, but at least I have the sense of perspective to view the camera (for once) as an inanimate and hence replaceable object. So all's well that ends well - but the week doesn't really end on monday, does it.

Tuesday I woke up with the cold to take all other colds outside, beat them up and laugh at them, but I had my quality management course to go to that I really didn't want to miss. By two o'clock I was so snotty and out of it I found myself almost counting the minutes until I could leave to go home to bed again (120 of them), not the kind of thing I can recall doing since the age of ten or so. I promised myself that if I was feeling as poorly the next morning I would just stay home in bed.

Wednesday I felt about 4% better in the morning, so didn't feel the need to honor the promise to self. As the course was very interesting, I don't regret it, but having a cold and being pregnant at the same time is not something I would recommend to anyone.

Thursday morning it was time to go to doctor for my prenatal check-up, since I clearly hadn't spent nearly enough time in waiting rooms or thinking about my general state of health already this week. It was a lovely morning, I was feeling better than for ages, and the doctor had nothing but good stuff to say. Bloodpressure, weight, the amount the belly had grown: everything was excellent. Except that he didn't seem to like my swollen ankles all that much. Neither do I, of course, it's hardly great looking, but who looks at ankles anyway? So I was very surprised when he continued to advise me very strongly indeed and more than once to cut down my working hours by half so as not to be sitting so much. I wasn't very keen on the idea at all, in fact, but on the other hand even I see that the twelve hour days in the previous week hadn't exactly left me feeling great, so I was trying to reach a compromise where I would just try to stick to not exeeding my normal hours. Then he played the blood clot card he had been hiding up his sleeve, and suddenly working 50% of the time sounded much better. Now the question is how to get all the work done in half the time. This will be great practice at delegating, I presume.

Friday was my first real stab at working for only 4 hours or so, and had me pretty much running around like a headless chicken trying to do everything simultaneously. I'll get the hang of it yet. I suppose going home and sitting down in front of the computer to do some more work for the remaining 4 hours isn't exactly going to swing it either? The doctor also wants me to get up and walk around every 15 minutes. I never realized this pregnancy thing would be so much hard work. And compared to being a parent I'm sure this is still the easy part. Oh dear.

For the positive upbeat ending: friday after my guilt-inducingly short workday I had a nice relaxing afternoon watching a short play, changing electricity suppliers, eating very prettily arranged chinese food, getting quotes from movers and working just a little bit in a very relaxed manner with my feet up at home. And saturday was excellent: had coffee outside in the brilliant sun in Aker Brygge with friends, while people-watching. Mostly it's all really posh people and tourists there, always a fascinating view. Today I have just been collapsed with tiredness, but I'm sure that's just temporary. Tomorrow's another week and all's well that ends well. There you go.

The idea of not eating

is eating me up.

A nice lady from the midwives' office called the other day and informed me that they would like me to do a glucose tolerance test, and what day would suit me best? Now, let's see. What day would suit me best to be fasting from midnight (including abstaining from water, although if need be I should feel free to rinse my mouth. Rinse my mouth!), show up at hospital at 8 AM hungry to have blood drawn, drink a quantity of hardly mouthwatering carbladen water, wait around for two hours, and then have more blood drawn before going directly to work having lost a good part of the morning to being hungry and correspondingly miffed and then worrying about the test results, the worst case scenario of which is having to stay away from any sugary snacks for at least the rest of the pregnancy (a fate on a par with only having to wear orange or being condemned to watch Lassie reruns on TV for the next three months for someone as enthusiastic about cakes as myself)? Oh sure, any day would be a good day for that.

Today is that day, yay! I would like to assure everyone that I am not (yet) in the habit of getting up in the middle of the night to eat, and that sleeping through the night without eating is in fact my normal MO. But as soon as the midnight ban on eating and drinking fell, I started to feel for it. Was I, perhaps, getting a bit hungry? Thirsty maybe? If I didn't have to get up every blessed hour to go to the bathroom I might have been able to sleep through, but I did so I wasn't. At 4.30 I gave up and got up, and here I am, trying -and failing miserably- not to think about not eating. But hey, only three and a half hours until I get to drink some sugar water. There'd better not be a queue at the lab.

On a related note, I would like to mention that I now - more than ever - have a truly profound respect for people who observe Ramadan.

NaNoWriMo: the next stupid big project

To-do list for November:

1. Move house
2. Write novel
3. Stay sane and healthy and get ready for maternity leave.

The third item follows from the first two, I suppose.

The first one is straightforward enough when boiled down to a point on a numbered list, but as everyone knows who has actually tried it, in reality those two little words contain quite a lot of work. On the positive side 1), we now have somewhere new to move to, and it is an absolutely lovely place (before you get your knickers in a twist, we don't own it, we're only renting. But it has a bathtub, a dishwasher, a balcony and room for a washing machine, all high on my list of the ultimate luxuries that life has so far denied me). On the positive side 2) I can't really carry anything much or even wash down the house, so I'll have to have someone else do those bits and my conscience will still be reasonably clear. There is, however, the issue of packing my (30? 40? 50?) dresses, my meters and meters of books and disassembling my bookshelves etcetera, the gruelling choices of what to throw out and what to leave behind, the inevitable visits to IKEA (tough even on people not dragging another person around on their belly), dealing with the broadband supplier, insurance provider, and so on and so on.

With this in mind, writing a novel in a month might not sound like the sharpest idea. Nevertheless, after reading No plot, No problem? Writing a novel in 30 days over my holidays this summer, the idea of joining NaNoWriMo and writing a novel in November has been growing to the size of an obsession in my mind. At this point I can't not try, and for good measure I have even been talking a few of my friends into doing it, making the point of no return nothing but a small light on the horizon behind me. What will it be about? Don't know. Do I have a chance in hell of actually completing the project? Don't know. But it will at least give me something else to focus on than my growing worries about childbirth and irritation at not being able to fit into anything remotely decent looking any more. There certainly is that.

Weeding

I will admit, I am a bit of a packrat (as evidenced, I suppose, by this). Although I don't really see myself as a collector of any kind, truth be told there are some categories of inanimate objects that take up so much of my living space that it isn't easily manageable. For instance, should you want to find a particular book, you have four or five different locations to look for it - that is, if you don't count tables, chairs and windowsills which would take us up to about fifteen. And removing one from the shelf is only done at the risk of having a pile of others throwing themselves at you, drawing a deep breath of relief at being released from their claustrophobic prisons or dark existences in unmentionable places last seen by the human eye months ago. And this worked -to a degree- for me when I was living all by myself - I do know the knack for evacuating one book from the shelf/chair/windowsill/cupboard/pile without making an avalanche, since I do that quite a lot. But now we are two here, and for some reason my love seems to spawn books (mostly Norwegian grammar ones) at the same very high rate as myself. In a few months there will be three of us, and from a purely genetical point of view I find it quite unlikely that the little fellow will go through his first years without accumulating vast amounts of books as well. We will need more space. We will need to move, preferably to an abandoned library. But as a stopgap, and a way of giving myself the feeling that I control the ocean of books threatening to drown us all, and not vice versa, I started weeding my bookshelves today.

Turns out, I could very easily locate eighteen volumes I'm certainly never going to re-read, and that will move on into the Bookcrossing universe in the next few days. Now I feel charitable and tidy, and have enough shelf space that the newcomers won't have to double-park again for a few more weeks. Maybe. I'm thinking I could probably repeat the excercise at least once or twice more before reaching any kind of pain threshold.

How big is a baby, anyway? ;-) No, seriously. We'll need to find a new place. But that's one crate less to move when the time comes. Well done, me!