Yesterday had no big crises, thank goodness. My drugstore was almost out of my medicine, for about the third time in the last six months - they need to start stocking more of it, or something - but they had enough on hand to give me a week's worth of pills, to last until they get a new shipment in.

My cellphone continued to not be broken. I have no idea what happened to it Monday. The cat did not pee on or in anything except the litterbox - though I did follow him upstairs when he tried to go up there and carry him back downstairs, and I shut him in the bathroom when I went to take my afternoon nap.

Somewhere around late afternoon or early evening, I noticed that our thermometer (which is a somewhat cheap variety of Galileo's Thermometer, marked in 4-degree increments) was showing that the room was a bit warmer than usual. It didn't go down (or in this thermometer's case, up) again, until sometime overnight. I don't know if that means our freon died again in only one day, or what. We need to get the AC guys over here to find the damned leak.

But other than that, it was a pretty good day. I lounged around in bed and read comics and napped. I loafed on the sofa and petted the cat (he spent most of the day half-draped over my leg) and chatted online and watched a movie.

At about 8:30, I noticed my stomach was doing this basketball thing (that is, it had acquired the approximate shape and hardness of a basketball) that Matt and I have dubbed a "squish," because we're pretty sure it's not a real contraction, but it's a little more intense than the usual Braxton-Hicks "practice" contraction.

Last week, for a couple of days, the squishes were timeable and regular, about an hour apart. I thought I'd see whether this one feel into that category, for practice with real contractions, if nothing else. I opened a window on my computer and typed in the time, then went back to chatting and playing around on Neopets while I waited for it to subside.

Twenty minutes later, I remarked on it. At about forty minutes, I got up and paced the kitchen/dining room corridor for a short while - that only seemed to make it more intense.

Normal contractions, mind you, hardly ever last more than about 60-90 seconds - and when they're that long, you're likely approaching the very end of labor.

All right; if increased activity wasn't going to make it go away, I'd try the reverse. I went upstairs and stretched out on the bed. Two minutes later, my stomach was... Well, it hasn't felt soft since about the fourth month, but it was no longer a basketball. Back to the overfull water balloon. Well.

I remained lying down for fifteen or twenty minutes, just to make sure, and then sat up to go back downstairs. And the damn squish came back.

At this point, I was well past the hour mark.

Now, I've been told to expect a lot of strange things here at the end of my pregnancy, but contractions of any sort that last longer than an hour were not on the list. I thought I was justified in calling the doctor's answering service and asking them to page whoever was on-call for the night.

I wound up on hold for at least five minutes. I wonder if last night was busy for the maternity ward. (You know, I'd really prefer it if the answering service said they were the answering service, instead of answering the phone with the name of the clinic alone. Just an aside.) A doctor called me back fairly quickly, and I explained what was going on.

"It's probably just that the baby's gotten into a position that feels like a contraction," the doctor said. "Had any bleeding? Pain? Can you feel any kicking? Well, if it goes away when you lay down, then that's probably what you should do. Call us back if it starts to hurt, or you see any sign of blood or water breaking."

Which is about what I'd figured they would say, but I wanted to make sure.

This morning, I had another sign of impending labor. <TMI>(I lost my mucous plug.)</TMI> When I went back to bed and told Matt about it, he said sleepily, "How long does that give us? A couple of days? A week?" We have a chart somewhere, you see, that lists various pre-labor symptoms and suggests about how long before labor they tend to occur.

"I don't remember," I confessed. "I'll have to find the book." So I got up and dug the book out of our half-packed hospital bag, and flipped through until I found the chart. "From hours up to a week beforehand," I read. "Hmph. Well, that's useful."

"Didn't the instructor say that was sort of theoretical?" Matt asked. "That she'd never heard of a woman who'd gone longer than forty-eight hours after that?"

"I think that might have been the lightening," I said, "and I definitely haven't dropped yet. But I could be remembering wrong. I don't think this is something you need to stay home from work for, though. Just don't go too far from your phone."

So here we are, poised and waiting while simultaneously trying to get on with our lives. The cat has an appointment with the vet this morning - Matt dropped him off on his way in to work, and I'm supposed to go pick him up around noon or so. And Matt is going to call the AC guys and attempt to nail them down on when exactly they think they'll be able to come actually fix the air conditioning, instead of just giving us a temporary patch.

I hope they can come do it soon. I'd really rather not bring the baby home to an un-air-conditioned house. Nopenopenope. Though I'm kind of twitching over it... What if they day they agree to do it turns out to be the day I have to go to the hospital? Well, I guess we can ask my parents if they'd come over and house-sit while the repair guys are here. But it's getting to where I need to start writing down every detail, in case it has to be taken care of by someone else or changed at the last minute.

It's also getting to where every tiny twinge in my abdomen makes me freeze in assessment, wondering, Is that it? I'm telling you, this whole process would be a lot easier to bear if we could just nail down the timing a little better...

--Liz