SANDWICHES

Since I spend a lot of my time sleeping now, there's a really good likelihood that this blog is going to be dominated by my bizarre dreams. Sadly, the things I spend time doing other than sleeping lately are almost universally boring, like marking. Or reading. Or fretting. Or wishing for sunshine.

This dream was a food dream and a sunshine dream, because I've been waking up around about 5am feeling seriously hungry. This must be related to Cletus (the name of the fetus, for the uninitiated) consuming a lot of energy. I was surprised to be hungry so early this morning (5am) since last night Keelin came over and I made sushi and dumplings and I ate a shedload. I was so full I had trouble getting to sleep.

Anyway, in this particular dream I was on a beach with my family, much like the little beach I was on with them last, on Inchcailloch in Loch Lomond (this past August). Only this beach was right outside my flat (only my flat wasn't my flat, it was another flat) almost like a balcony. And there were baby bear cubs burrowing in the sand by the waterline, obviously.  There were also bunnies living in the sand, but these aren't very interesting when bear cubs are around. Bronwyn (my niece) and my parents and my sister were playing with the bear cubs, and I was trying to warn them this was a bad idea, because clearly the angry mama bear could be around anywhere.

This isn't even the good part. There was a fridge just inside the flat that was filled with AMERICAN SANDWICHES. 

It was awesome. Trust me.

None of this "filled roll" business. Kaiser rolls! KAISER ROLLS. With multiple slices of Boar's head turkey! Tuna salad, with no sweetcorn! Lobster rolls! Hot wings with blue cheese*! I didn't see them specifically, but I'm pretty much totally sure that if I'd had time to look I would have found kosher dill pickles, because after all this is my dream fridge. I was spoiled for choice, I didn't know which to eat first. I chose a chicken sandwich with mozzarella, tomato and basil, oddly. Because that I can get here, or make easily. I was about to dig in when.....

SNORING. Jamie snoring. Woke me up just before my glorious moment of sandwiching. Tragic really. So instead, I got up and and lumbered to the fridge and had a dried fig. Considerably less exciting than the Sandwich/generally unobtainable American food fridge. It was really a ploy to try and get me back to sleep, and back to that sandwich fridge. Sadly, it was not to be. And I was hungry again an hour later, at which point I had a dry piece of bread. YUM. 

I would like to recreate some semblance of dream sandwich fridge, but it's difficult. The primary difficulty is that there are no kaiser rolls, and absolutely no pickles, and what pickles there may be are usually seriously sub-par. Radioactive slimy floppy looking things. No crunch. There's also a cold cut (lunch meat) issue. One, I've never seen anything like delicious Boar's head here. Two, I'm not supposed to have any cured meats or lunch meat unless I thoroughly heat it first, which kind of defeats the point of cold cuts.

Anyway, that's really it. These are things that are exciting these days.

*I know these aren't technically sandwiches, but they are delicious and unobtainable on my current continent.

The year of the baby

Happy new year everyone! So I know I haven't been updating...really at all. I'm bad at it. It's a bit of a resolution to get better. In doing so, I think I need to master the brief but informative post.

I'm inspired by my trials in marking. One of the questions I'm marking is an essay question, "Is the rhyme a constituent within the syllable?" As usual, some of the answers are seriously lengthy yet also completely wrong, some are decent, and some reveal that the student actually has no idea what a syllable is (atomic is a monosyllabic word? ask a fourth grader about that...)

However, by far the best answer I've gotten so far is simply, "Yes." So concise, so totally correct. Beautiful. So much less work for me. I would love to just give it the full 100 points for cheekiness and pointing out that they did in fact ask a yes or no question as an essay question, which is bad practice.

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes. Brevity, pregnancy etc. I'm just about entering the beginning of week 9. The nausea is extremely irritating and I feel like it keeps me from doing/concentrating on anything. I'm not actually getting sick very often, with the exception of a few incidents at home and once in a Thai restaurant before we'd even ordered (side note: vomiting in a restaurant is really awkward, since you feel you have to explain to other bathroom goers between retches that it's not the food nor are you bulimic, you are simply pregnant).

I've always had a finicky stomach and vomiting has never bothered me, in fact, I find it relieves the nausea. Just having the nausea there is pretty awful. But, I'm eating regularly and keeping the food down. I seem to have lost weight despite this, but I don't think this is that strange considering I'm not drinking regularly for the first time in like 5 years. Still sleeping like it's going out of style, but that will have to end soon as teaching starts up again next week. I'm pretty anxious about doing all I need to do in the next 6-7 months or so. I have two completely new courses to deliver (luckily not simultaneously), tutoring, a move Feb 1 (hopefully), an 8000 word chapter to write for Oxford University Press by May, a publication that's been stalling for months, data collection to finish (roughly 2-3 experiments worth) and data analysis to do, and a thesis to start writing.  And I need to build a baby. Daunting stuff.

Lastly, I had a baby dream, a first really. I've been watching One Born Every Minute, a documentary series on Channel 4 about a labour and delivery ward at a hospital in the UK. It's good in many ways because it's helping me know what to expect, but also, a bit anxiety inducing seeing all those women in labour. It doesn't look all that fun. On the plus side, I would say about half of them are doing it without an epidural, something I aspire to. 

Anyway, watching it all day yesterday somehow inspired this bizarre dream. We had had the baby, and Jamie was carrying it around in a pouch upside down. Diagram below. It looks rather obscene, really, but his intentions were good.

BabyPouch™ - The natural way to carry your baby.

I was a bit concerned about the baby being carried around upside down with all its weight on its head, but Jamie was insisting that it was fine and even preferable, because that's how the baby was in my stomach. And he wouldn't listen to me when I was like, yes, but at that point the baby wasn't breathing through it's MOUTH, and it was suspended in LIQUID. So he was just walking around with this upside down baby, and all I could see was its little baby legs sticking up out of the pouch. At least it wasn't breach?? I couldn't tell the sex either, since I could only see baby legs, so no premonition there.

Anyway, here's to brevity.