Just in case you were wondering, I am not feeling round in a cute, pregnant way today.

Today I am feeling round in a gigantic, Hilda-the-hippo enormously fat kind of way.

And my new maternity shirt, which was supposed to be exactly like another one, except for being a different color, has shoulder pads in it. Which I didn't realize until I put it on.

Shoulder pads? Okay, look. The illusion of shoulder pads is supposed to make the waist and hips look a little smaller by comparison with the shoulders. I can grasp that. I'm okay with that.

But doesn't it strike you as sort of ridiculous to even try to make a pregnant woman's waist look smaller?

And as long as I'm complaining about pregnancy things, let me just say that Whoever thought the cracking skin thing was funny (and I won't get into any more detail, for those of you who would rather Not Know - those of you who have been pregnant or had pregnant significant others probably already know what I'm talking about)... Where was I? Oh, yes. Whoever thought this would be a good idea can just go take a long walk off a short pier.

I did absolutely nothing of significant value over the weekend. I participated in four - count 'em, four - Hall sessions, and that pretty well ate up all of Saturday and Sunday. The Giant Chicken of Plot has come home to roost. There will be much Halling in my near future.

What else did we do? Um...

Friday evening we went down to visit K.T. and Kevin, since K.T. was released from the hospital Friday against both our expectations. (The good news is, her new lung doctor is determined to asthma not only under control but to make it recede. The bad news is, she's now on about six billion new medications, some of which have less than fun side-effects.)

Matt went with Kevin to the grocery store. He may never do so again for anything other than a soda-and-chips run. Kevin didn't know where anything in the store actually was (what the hell does he do when he and K.T. are shopping? Read a book?), but categorically refused to walk down every aisle to look for things. What should have been a 45-minute shopping trip took them an hour and a half.

We did some shopping Saturday, in which I forgot to pick up the two things from Target that I've been saying I would pick up the next time I went to Target. And after deciding I had plenty of cash for another week and skipping the ATM, I spent most of my cash on comics and lunch, so now I have approximately four dollars to get me through the week.

Sunday... Laundry. Matt mowed the lawn. I tried a new recipe that K.T. found for dinner, that turned out to be very tasty (though the onions needed to be sliced a little thinner so they'd cook faster, and I put too much pepper on the chicken for my weird pregnancy taste). It would have been even better if I hadn't burned the rice. At least enough was salvageable to eat with dinner.

(As a side note - I have decided that I really like Rice-a-roni. It's hideously bad for me, of course, but I like it anyway.)

That was it. The whole rest of the weekend was spent Halling. Not that it wasn't fun, of course, but I'd really meant to make some progress toward setting up the nursery.

So that's this week's goal. I will clear off the old computer desk and either pack or find a new place for all that crap. And I will pack up all the books from the computer room that I haven't so much as flipped through since we moved in. And I will get all that stuff out of the way so that Matt can get Braz or someone to come over and help him move the old computer desk out of that room and down into the garage, and then move the guest bed into the computer room.

That's this week's goal. If I can get that much done (and really, it's not that much to do) then I want to also get into the closet in the guest room (I guess I should start calling it the nursery, shouldn't I?) and make sure all the Christmas decorations are sufficiently packed up that they can be hauled up into the attic, whenever that's going to happen.

And then I need to get some organizers and shelves to put on the remaining computer desk, because we're going to need some organizing system if we're going to keep the PC available.

You'll notice that I haven't even mentioned preparing the nursery, except for getting the current stuff out of there.

Three months to go.

--Liz