Tag: slice of life

The whore and the grump

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Remember how I mentioned previously that our cats were behaving really oddly in a recent post? It’s getting even more odd.

I mean, having Reenie sprawled on the bed in the middle of the night is not new.

But having to sleep diagonally in bed because both cats are hogging your sleeping space is a new one.

I got fed up and chucked them both off the bed at 4 this morning. I feel a bit bad about that, because we actually do like having them closer around these days, but at the same time it’s been impossible to get a good night’s sleep in the past week!

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New passporty goodness

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I got my new passport today, huzzah!

I don’t look like a serial killer in it, huzzah! huzzah!!

Now I have to give it to the HR department, who will send it to the Home Office, where it will fester on the desk of some bored clerk for 6-to-8 weeks before he puts a stamp in it, with his ass, and it is shipped back to me.

I’m not really fussed about the waiting, as I have no travel plans in the immediate future, but I am annoyed that my passport is currently my only form of official photo identification.

Ah well, such is life.

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What’s been happening in the last little while

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A lot of stuff happened since the last time I wrote. Let’s see…

Katy and I went to the Pub to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Since it was a special occasion, we went he rules a bit and Katy indulged in her first naughty pudding in ages.

The Sky engineer came on Friday morning to install our shiny new Sky+HD box. This means that we can now timeshift our favourite shows, pause live tv and watch the HD channels on our shiny new tv :) The whole thing started when we wanted to get a regular Sky+ box to record shows but were unable to order one because the website melted down. We could order an HD box, but then we realized that our old tv didn’t have the right connectors to take advantage of the full HD experience. It provided us with the perfect opportunity to get rid of our old tv and get a new one with a much happier disposition. What’s impressive is that the new one is bigger, better and cost almost a third less than our original one. Yay, progress.

We went to Leicester this past weekend to go see Katy’s folks and meet up with Pam. It was a fun morning and she gave us a ton of baby clothes. We should be set for the next little while :) Mel was in full grumpy old man mode. We think that the whole heart bypass experience wasn’t what he expected. He’s getting better, but is still limited in what he can do and it’s starting to piss him off. He cant stand doing nothing and is bored, and therefore grumpy. Katy took the opportunity to get most of her mane chopped off and restyled. She’s happy with the result and so am I. It means that her hair won’t try and smother me in my sleep anymore.

We were finally able to take Tolstoy to the vets last night. He was due for his annual checkup and booster shots weeks ago, but between all of Katy’s trips to the hospital, we were never able to get it done. Of course the charming animal took that day to come in covered in sticky seed pods. As in, he was a giant hair tangle from head to tail tip. The vet was impressed at his phlegmatic response to being held and partially shaved. Normally, cats need to be fully sedated under a general anesthetic when they’re dematted and shaved. Our boy did it sober and didn’t even raise a fuss. We expected him to bugger off and disappear and sulk for a day or so. We did not expect him to turn into a man-whore that night!

Tolstoy, at best, tolerates our presence and treats us with generalized disdain. He’ll deign to be in the same room as us but doesn’t like to be held or fussed on. Last night? He jumped on the bed(!), sprawled on my chest (!!) and spent most of the night sleeping on the bed (!!!). This is unheard-of behaviour. I mean, having Reenie jump all over us and sleep with us is not a biggie these days. But Tolstoy? wow!

Katy and I didn’t sleep well though. We both went to bed with a case of man flu. It came on in the early evening and just got a bit unpleasant. Sore throat and stuffy-and-runny noses. Made for some cracking snoring from Katy. It’s better today though. We’re making sure to keep well hydrated, and advil/tylenol keeps the aches at bay.

We went to Addenbrookes today for Katy’s scans and various clinics. Ben has been very active in the last few days. This is a good thing, because it’s the best sign that all is generally well, but it has the less pleasant side-effect of making it hard for Katy to get a full night’s sleep. The scan shows that Ben has gotten bigger. He’s now at the top-range of normal and is 2.2 kg. The diabetic clinic nurses have told Katy to increase her insulin levels because he’s putting on a bit too much weight so it’s going to be important to keep an even closer watch to her sugar levels. A bit of good news: her liver levels seem to be settling. They were lower today than at the last reading last week.

We had a bit of a scare with her blood pressure, which was at 160/113 but when we went to the MFAU to get serial blood pressure checks, we got 5 readings at or around 120/75. Katy’s blood pressure has always been nothing if not erratic, but we even asked the midwife to take a manual reading to confirm the good news and it was 120/80. Go fiigure… The good news is that she didn’t need to get admitted today :)

Hopefully, things will continue in this trend and we won’t have any issues to go see Bill Bailey in London next week!!

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The cats know something is amiss

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I’m pretty sure that the cats know that something is not right at the moment. They’re both being much bigger fusspots than usual. Reenie has taken to sleeping curled up on the couch propped up against my when I’m watching late-late-night TV and this morning, Tolstoy barked at me, jumped up on the bed (!) and demanded fuss while paddling my stomach. This is not normal behaviour for our cats. It’s more along the lines of benevolent contempt for us.

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This limits my options for a mid-life crisis

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Most men, when they reach the point of a mid-life crisis, will either get a motorcycle, a bright red sports car or a mistress.

As we were driving up to Leicester this morning, I was once again reminded just how shockingly bad my eyesight is. Unless medical science can pull off some sort of miracle, there is no way in hell I will be able to get a driver’s license. This therefore means that I have only one option for a mid-life crisis, but I have been told (by Katy) that I am not allowed to get a mistress.

What is a man to do?

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Week in review – things did not go according to plan

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It’s been a busy couple of days, it has. We were in Leicester last weekend to meet up with Anna and Rho, who had come from Manchester to catch up with Katy. That was a fun morning – those two are always good for a laugh. Rhona always seems to be complaining about something in a very loud and emphatic sort of way. Always makes me giggle.

The cot bed we wanted was finally back in stock at Ikea so Mel and Stu did a run up to Nottingham on Friday to avoid the madness that is Ikea on a sunny Saturday. We might have made a convert of Stu, who seems to have seen a table he likes in there. Yay, Ikea :)

This means that we now have all the big furniture pieces that we wanted for the nursery and we now simply need to build stuff and put everything in its final place.

We had a lazy Sunday morning. Katy had a lay-in and then proceeded to get pissy with the impossible puzzle we’d gotten for Mel’s last-last birthday. He’s been working at it for over a year (and has just informed us that he’s wimped out, admitted defeat and broken it down). I was, to be honest, bored senseless for most of the day.

While the world was shitting its collective pair of pants on Meltdown Monday, I was experiencing Migraine Monday, so I didn’t go into work and spent the morning in bed. I was feeling better by the afternoon so I started building furniture. I must admit that Mothercare flat-pack furniture is not up to Ikea standards. There is one bolt that doesn’t want to screw in and it’s pissing me off.  It is offensive in my sight  because the whole crib seems rickety because of it. I’m going to go to B&Q to get another bolt and see if that helps. If not, I’ll just use nice, large wood screws. Esthetics be damned, I want the thing secure :)

Katy had an appointment at the antenatal diabetic clinic on Tuesday. Her blood tests the previous weeks had indicated that she had gestational diabetes. Given that she’s a big girl, is Asian and has a family history of diabetes, this wasn’t unexpected. The good news is that the dietician said that our diet was already very much on the good track (complex carbs, lean proteins, lots of fruit & veg). The bad news is that she has now cut Katy off from any processed or refined sugar until Ben is born. This is, for those who know Katy, very bad news indeed. At least it’s only for a few months, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition though, and Katy’s blood pressure really threw a spanner in the works. It’s been borderline for weeks now and never seemed to make up its mind if it was high or normal. The doctors finally decided that enough was enough and told Katy that she was going to be admitted for observation and possibly put on medication. The timing of this was, in our opinion, possibly the worst time possible. We hadn’t planned for this, so Katy only had the clothes on her back and nothing else. I also had to get the car out of the Park & Ride parking and back home to avoid from getting it clamped – an interesting feat given that I can’t drive. In the end, I called some lads from work, who picked the car and myself up from the Park & Ride and drove us both home. Michael, the pinch-driver, had a bit of fun getting used to a right-hand drive car, but got us home safely. It’s interesting to note that we might be seeing him on Thursday when his partner is being admitted to the same ward as Katy to get her twins induced.

I had time to pack an overnight bag for Katy while I waited for Tesco to deliver our groceries. I managed to get a lift back to the hospital in the evening and spent time with my very bored wife and her new friend, Felix the serial blood pressure machine. She named it because she figured that shed probably get to be really well acquainted with it.

I stopped by the office to talk with the powers that be and, in the process, pick up the two parcels that my mom had shipped to us from Canada. It seems that everybody had been commenting about the 62$ worth of stamps affixed on the parcels :) I need to bring them back into work for somebody’s collection next week.

The plan now is to take regular blood pressure readings to establish a baseline and see if the meds they’ve prescribed lower it enough to get to a stable level they’re happy with, but not too low. I’ve loaded her up with grapes and strawberries, oat biscuits she’s allowed to eat and enough trashy magazines to rot her brain multiple times over. My boss has given me carte blanche to spend time with her at the hospital so I won’t be getting much work done this week. Having said that, if I were at the office, I doubt I’d be getting anything done, really.

Most of today was spent trying to find ways to kill time. I went out and got myself fish & chips for dinner – something that I’m still regretting hours later because it’s sitting like a lead balloon in my gut and giving me all sorts of unholy gas.

The good news is that the meds seem to be wanting to work in the right direction. The bad news is that they need to tweak the dosage and/or timing of the doses – which means that Katy will probably need to spend another day in observation. This does not make her happy. She’s getting to the point where she just wants to come home and relax in familiar surroundings, with the cats (who are being right little attention whores at the moment – Reenie is sleeping on the couch with her head on my foot as i type this).

We both know that this is the right thing to do and the right time for it. Spending a few uncomfortable days now could potentially save lots of hassle later on if we did nothing and things went pear-shaped and required more aggressive treatment in the future. It still doesn’t change the fact that it’s a pain in the ass and it would have been even better to have been able to avoid the issue altogether.

Like the song says thouggh, you can’t always get what you want.

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A nice way to spend the day

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Katy and I went to Bury St-Edmunds yesterday to have the car serviced and MOT’ed. It cost us roughly double what we were quoted, but what can you do. At least we now have a new set of front brakes and a new pollen filter for the AC and the hand brake actually feels connected to something.

While the car was being worked on, we went walkies in the city center. Bury has a nice outdoor market that I could very easily see myself use and abuse if we lived there. We also bought yet more stuff for the nursery, though it was mostly decorations and cuddly toys this time. We’re horrible ;) We bought a bunch of short sleeved & long sleeved jumpsuits, a bath mitten (that Katy has waaay too much fun with in the store), a plush rabbit that just jumped in our hands and we couldn’t put back on the shelf (honest!)

We had lunch at Brasserie Chez Gerard and then picked up the car and drove back home. We had sloppy joe submarines for dinner and then spent the evening clearing out unused stuff from out kitchen and reorganizing everything. The house is starting to get to a point where it’s almost junk free (we’re giving away a ton of schmutz to charity shops). All we need to do now is to build the last bits of furniture and then we can start putting the final touches on the nursery :)

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Do you think we have enough stuff?

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This past weekend was a busy one for Katy and I.

I’d taken Friday off so that we could be in Leicester early in the morning. Mel had rented a van so that we could go to Ikea and buy some nursery-related stuff and a new bed to keep in Leicester. The futon we were using in Leics is now too low to the ground and Katy can’t get in and out of it easily these days, so we decided to get a proper bed. The plan was to go to do a Leics – Ikea run to get the stuff, dump the bed out in Leicester, load the futon and some other things that needed selling, bring them down to Cambridge to dump them at our house, then drive back to Leicester and go build the bed. It was a looooooooong day :) I’d already sold the futon and Katy’s old television to people at work, so that’ll help cover some of the costs. We also got an insurance refund for the vet fees from last month, which will also help.

It’ll still be an expensive month though, cause we spent £400 at Ikea, and another £450 at Mothercare. This past weekend was when we really kitted out the nursery. We bought the crib that we’ll be using for the first few months in the bedroom, as well as a mattress, some sheets and two sleeping bags. We also bought a bottle kit with sterilizer, bottles, brushes, teats and a bottle warmer. That’s going to live in the kitchen. We bought some bath and bathroom stuff and some towels. We got a travel cot for when we come to see Katy’s folks. The only thing that we wanted to get but didn’t was the car seat. We’d originally wanted to get one that would be big enough to last for the first 4 years and, though the website said that it should have fit in the Corolla, it didn’t. The seatbelts were just a bit too short to secure it properly. This is a known thing with the car model because there are so many variants of it and they’re all just slightly different from one another. Blergh. We ended up just buying a 0-9month car seat that will double as a carrier. We can get the bigger one later. It should fit correctly when it’s forward-facing.

All in all though, I’m happy with our purchases. We’ve made judicious use of our coupons and we’re actually under budget for what we wanted to get. It really hits home though that we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing. We spent about 30 minutes in the bedding section looking things over and wondering what we should get, and how much of it. How many blankets does a baby need? I don’t know!!!!! (5 exclamation marks, a sure sign of a sick mind!)

Seriously, it’s starting to get a bit overwhelming. Katy stops work in just over 6 weeks and the Peanut is due in less than 3 months and we are so, so clueless as to what will happen and how we’ll do it. We keep saying to ourselves that as long as we’re together, everything is going to be ok. Usually, when one starts to freak out, the other steps in with the mantra. Hopefully, we never need to find out what happens when/if we both freak out together :)

I’m rather annoyed with Katy’s parents at the minute. It would seem that they think our house is a tip at the moment. Katy’s dad said that to her mom after dropping the stuff off on Friday. I resent him saying that. We aren’t in the position they are. He’s retired and spends an inordinate amount of time and energy keeping the house to a stupidly high level of cleanliness that I not only wouldn’t want to maintain but actually find oppressing at times. These are people who rinse out every pot, pan, plate and cutlery item before it goes in the dishwasher. We’ve actually seen them wipe down the inside of the dishwasher – BEFORE they put it on. So yes. I’ll grant that our house is cluttered, it needs a good vacuuming to get rid of the cat hair on the carpets and there are dishes in the sink. So what? There’s nothing suspicious growing in dark corners slowly evolving towards sentience. There’s dust, but there’s no dinge or dirt. It’s nothing that a good day’s cleaning won’t sort out. But you know what? Between the pregnancy and all the associated stress, all the stuff we need to do and our desire to spend time together, keeping house is relegated to the bottom of the todo list and I don’t want people nagging us and passing judgement about it.

On a brighter note, I got my picture taken for my new passport on Saturday and I’m happy to report that I actually look good on it! For once, if all goes well, I will have a photo ID where I don’t look like I’m a serial killer recently escaped from a mental institute!

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HUPO wrap-up and the days that came later

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I made it back from Amsterdam in one piece and no drug-related incidents. I was mildly concerned that there might be dogs and they might have objected to some lingering scents from my clothes (oh come on, this is Amsterdam we’re talking about here!) but we made it back home with no problems. In fact, it was probably my easiest customs clearance in Stansted in memory. There was no queue. The buggers did change the layout of the landing card though, which made me waste a bit of time, having to read it.

I worked from home on Thursday and took Friday off sick cause I had a lingering headache that took its sweet time to go away. Yesterday was a bank holiday so all in all, it was a 4 day weekend. I could use more of those, even if Katy and I did spend it watching waaaaaaaaaaay too many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, we are sad. Yes, we know it.

We did get some grown-up work done; laundry and groceries and the such. We’ve started buying nappies and baby wipes. One of the books mentioned that if you start buying that stuff before the kids are due and you’re still on full pay, it can really help ease the burden of low maternity pay. We stared, slack-jawed, at the wall of diapers in Tesco and we kept asking ourselves which ones to get and if more expensive really is better. In the end, we went for a brand name that was on sale. We’ll get more of the same in the following weeks. This mildly freaks me out.

We also managed to get some fun stuff done though. We had a BBQ on Saturday where we went completely overboard on the sausages. We went to Cafe Rouge on Monday, just for the hell of it. We wanted to catch a movie as well, but Katy was feeling a bit tired. The last few weeks have been emotional for her and it seems to have caught up with her. There’s the whole Rita issue, for one. She’s decided – and I support her decision – to simply cut all contact. Drastic, but it’s at the point where she’s getting more negative than positive from the whole thing and it’s time to call it quits and move on. I had something similar happen with Seb, years ago, so I do understand where she’s coming from. People change…

The plan for the next few days is work, work and work and then Ikea. I also need to start going back to the gym again. It’s been way too long and I’ve gotten in horrible shape. All the good work that I’d done for the wedding is long gone. I’ve not gained too much weight, but the muscle turned to flab and must be dealt with now. Blergh. Don’t wanna, but need to. Such is life.

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