Tagged: 101 things in 1001 days

In 2009, I pledged to do 1001 things. These posts are a catalogue of my progress. I don’t think I’ll make it to 100%, but I’ve managed to check off a good number of them.

My complete birth story

R, a few minutes old
R, a few minutes old
TL;DR I had a long but excellent birth experience. BC Women’s is kickin’ rad.

In the prenatal class, we talked about our birth plan and “birth fairies.” The idea was that, like the story of Sleeping Beauty, even if we try only to plan for good things, the not-so-nice fairy might still come to crash the party. The only way to not be weighed down by disappointment is to be make sure we have the skills to deal with as many things as possible. And we learned many skills, from meditation to birth balls to baths to taking naps and doing crosswords to baking cookies.

So, like many women, I had hoped for a natural unmedicated birth: it’s rumoured to be quicker in transition (aka pushing), stuff heals more quickly, I wanted “the experience,” and giant spine needles are NOPE NOPE NOPE D:

My pregnancy was fairly uneventful. Three months of nausea gave way to six months of physically feeling fairly glorious — my worst complaint was heartburn and needing about 17 million pillows to sleep comfortably. There were moments when I felt like a fat, beached whale, waddling around bitching about people not giving me seats on the bus, but the extra weight didn’t really catch up to me until the last few weeks, when going up and down the stairs at work really sucked.

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Server woes no mo’! Also, horses and bikes, words and diaspora

Just finished porting over the last of the stuff that was locked in facebook-neverland. <smacks lips>

Brief synopsis: after upgrading to Lucid, my slicehost server went kaput and couldn’t get up for some time. I tried all the pills I could, but finally declared it unrevivable and nuked it. I thought I could export my blog posts from facebook afterwards but noooo… The RSS feed was broken and there was no guarantee that it would ever come back for the handful of us who care enough to want it. So it was manual copy+paste for the 40 or so posts stuck in facebook neverland.

BUT NOW

WordPress is up running this blog, tracks is up on a subdomain, and squid3 is making life easier at work too!

The main problem I had with tracks today were goofs… First I used the wrong password in database.yml, then I told lighttpd to look for dispatch.fcgi in the wrong place. BUT NOW everything is working and I can start focusing on getting the WP theme to not suck.

W is a sweet boy of six years, which is about 13 or 14 years in human years. He’s quite a dear for trying to rub me off on trees, but otherwise he was fairly laid back and would have to be pushed quite a bit to get up to a good speed. P is the opposite. The chubby girl was raring to go at every chance, and barely needed a nudge to take me on a short canter. Freaked out our hosts. They kept saying I did good.

The part that surprised me was how much Papa knew about horses. Over dinner one night he rambled off all sorts of breeds from around the world, who raced in what races, what awaits a horse when he comes of age… I think I’ve found that bond I need with my father, at last. I wager he’s probably a better rider than I.

I’ve also started riding my bicycle again. It was spurred on by the need to get better at it for my 101 pledge, and again by the peeps who got me into motorcycles. M is en route to getting his motorcycle already and soon I’ll get my gear as well, so I can ride safely on his bike. I wanted to get licensed myself this summer but there isn’t enough time. So I just got a new pedal-bike. Good enough. <rubs hands together>

I started writing on 750words as much as I could to get my writing going again. It’s fun, almost obsessive-compulsive. (Gotta ollect all them badges!) I’ve been griping about not creating enough recently—I’m reading tons of blogs, too many perhaps, and am immersed in social media stuff, again too much perhaps—so the free-writing opportunity was a great place to kick that.

The content of that isn’t too different from my other writing, but I do tend to self-edit more here than there. It’s almost difficult for me to not self-edit as I write. I’m not used to the mechanism of simply writing… it seems the voices in my head quiet down when the spotlight is shone on them.

Anyway, I feel I’m off balance again. Too much consuming not enough creating. I need to rein in from the diaspora.

Not to be confused with the Diaspora, of which I am lucky to backer (albeit a minor one).

I am also a backer of Am I Broken?

I am also loving education blogs. I might become an educator some day, though right now I oughta focus on becoming a shrink.

Right now right now I oughta go to bed…

Handwriting

Last year I received a Christmas letter from M’s mum that briefly chronicled her and her immediate family’s adventures. It felt special — partly because I was mentioned, but partly also because it brought back a pang of nostalgia.

Card-writing was a ritual that involved the whole family. I recall resenting it somewhat; I hardly knew most of these aunts and uncles whose Christmases and New Years were going to be happy and merry at the expense of my hurting hand. Sometimes we got creative and stamped the cards with colourful stars or mistletoes. I used a glitter pen one year and I got glitter all over my hands for days. But I liked receiving cards so I didn’t complained much. (I think. I’d have to check with mum on that.)

In Hong Kong, our windows were covered with security metal bars disguised as decorations. We used to string cards all along it, and watch as our collection grow. Many came from names I didn’t recognise; some of them, mum would look at for a long time before hanging up. Our neighbours across the street would do the same thing. The side of the building was a wonderful display of fire hazard throughout December.

Slowly, the strings of paper cards dwindled. We stopped sending them at some point. I think it was the year we moved to Canada. We sent out e-mails and e-cards instead. Eventually we stopped sending those too.

M and I sent out Christmas letters this year. We printed most of them on card stock and wrote a few special ones by hand (like the one we sent to Gooma and M’s mum and grandmother). Included were some photos that were taken by talented Marlis Funk. I don’t know if the recipients shared the same feeling of specialness, but if even a handful of them did, I did good.

Halcyon on and on

The day after we arrived at M’s mum’s house the tension was thicker than the sweetest oxygen. I left the room crying on Christmas morning. After that, I kept my head low and dared not speak unless spoken to.

The same thing happened last Christmas too, M’s mum confided later, and she was the one who left crying. She went shopping for hours afterward so she might heal. So this year’s impulse for a getaway, though sudden, made all the sense in the world.

Five of us crammed into M’s car and drove to the hot springs nearby — we are quite lucky to be near so many here — and we soaked for several hours in the sulphurous pools. It was good to float. (Well, I tended more to sink.) I love water. I suspect I would wilt and die if I could not live near a large body of water.

I could scratch off this item on the list but, to be frank, I was a little disappointed. The hot springs I grew up knowing about were not mere swimming pools filled with steamy hot water that smelt funny. In the manga I read as I was growing up the hot springs had stone steps and stone walls and was mostly a wild place, except for the little bathhouse that neatly blocks its entryway. There were no spas or restaurants that gouge you simply because there’s nothing else within reasonable driving distance.

So I’m amending this goal to be “visit a (more) natural hot spring” because damn, this kinda sucked.