bed arrest

after a five (!) year hiatus, i decided that being bed-ridden during my last two months of pregnancy is the perfect time to blog again. right? genius, i tell ya.

so, here i am. and even more surrounded by testosterone since i began this blog back in our mountain days. the love and i got married back in october 2007, bought a white picket fence house in 2008, and had our son (from now on referred to as H) in 2009. so, now there's me, my main squeeze (let's call him D until i get more creative), our 2 plus year old, and the same ol' smelly yellow lab. except now he's smellier. and older.

AND, of course, there's baby numero dos. since we're not finding out the gender until the birth day, we'll just call them baby numero dos and hope every day for a little more estrogen to balance my world.

my goal for this, my first week back on the blogging bus? one post a day. on your mark, get set, GO!

did you ever have one of those days, weekends, months, when you just needed to be alone and wallow in whatever mood you were in? i am so having one of those... which i have realised are so much harder to enjoy when you live with someone, like your fiance. thankfully, mine has been a wee bit understanding and has let me spend my saturday evening watching chick flicks and my sunday morning procrastisurfing. now all i need is a claw footed tub!

meeting my biannual blog quota

so i was re-reading a post below about how i thought i was bad at things i am not inherently talented at and i realised i am slowly coming to terms with this. i know i am because all my professional energy right now is being put towards becoming a teacher. there is no other job out there where you are constantly being reminded of how much you don't know what you are doing than when you work with children. they have this amazing ability to bring you back to reality with how they are all entirely different and always present you with a new problem or question you have never encountered before. and though i struggle through some days with my current bunch of students, i am not giving up, which is my usual defense mechanism. even though i have no idea how to respond, or what to do in some instances, i am enjoying the not-knowing, the not-being-good-at for the first time in my life. well, maybe not enjoying it, but at least i am not quitting. AND i am spending oodles of imaginary loan money going back to school to become a teacher, a job i will never be 100% amazing at just because no one can. and i am ok with this. actually, i think the best way to be approach teaching is to own that you will never know everything and that actually the one thing that will make you better at your job is to never stop learning.

missing

i have this thing when i travel. i had it the whole time i lived in england and the whole time i lived in scotland. there are quite a few people who can attest to this routine behaviour. i wait till the absolute last minute to pack. then i end up staying awake all night, even after i have finished packing, doing random things. like writing in my travel journal, or emailing friends, or staring out the window at the london skyline. or like writing an entry in my blog which has been covered in cobwebs since christmas.

i am heading to germany this weekend for the wedding of a very good friend of mine from college. it is completely impracticle for me to go. i have no money and my fiance and i are attempting to save for our own wedding but it is one of my bestest and i can't not be there. i will not even have much time to spend with him, what with all the folks there, but it is important to us both that i be there. it is also important for me to be there because i will be meeting up with another soulpal from living abroad. oh my some girl, i miss you so. and thinking about missing you, and needing you in my life more reminds me off all those folks i miss.

i guess this longing is really apparent right now because the boy and i are on the point of not even having a wedding since they are too damn expensive per guest-head. but my friends are me and i can't imagine not having them there with me. why do people have to equal money? why is the wedding industry such a sham? it's a real struggle. and i know it sounds kind of petty. i know there are people out there with bigger problems than this. (i watched the constant gardener tonight so the irony was way obvious.) but not being able to have a wedding for me is a huge symbol of a much bigger aspect of my life.

when i was a little girl, i promised myself that i would do 'better' than my parents. i wouldn't have the thrown together family bbq that was their wedding. it worked for them, but it wasn't a choice in my mind. i wanted my people there, from near and far. and yet, here i am, back in the same area i grew up in, feeling so less further evolved than them. about to have an even more white trash wedding. thank god i am in grad school or i would really be feeling depressed about my lack of forward motion. at least this weekend in germany will remind me of all i had, and chose not to have now. it will be good to meet up with old friends, including my insomniac world travelling former self.

go conts!

so i just posted a comment on a myspace board about my alma mater and i thought to prove just how much i l-o-v-e hamilton i would post it here too- enjoy!

i was sad to see all these comments bashing hamilton, but i totally respect it's not for everyone.

to give you a different opinion- i think the place is amazing!

of course some people are shut off, but that happens everywhere. just look at life, most people won't give you a glance when you walk down the street (hello, we do live in new england!) but that is just life. we live in little circles. i loved my circle at hamilton.

hamilton is where i made the most amazing life long friends. they are people that i know i can count on for whatever, whenever and they will be there. ok, so yeah, that sounds cheezy, but it is oh so true. and i am not talking two people. there are quite a few hamiltonians spread around the world who will always have a couch for me to crash on.

plus the campus is amazing! you can't beat the glen covered in snow or beinecke lit up at night.

so clinton doesn't have a lot of places to go out at night, but the convos i have had on the adk porch at lunch or whispered in the library at 2am are some of the most life changing i think i will ever have. actually, now that i have been out for almost four years (ack, is it really that long?) i find myself missing that unique hamilton college experience of having my closest pals always within walking distance for a chat or a cuppa.

what i will remember most from college aren't the late nights drinking or the walks of shame (and i've had my share), it is those rare moments when i really connected with someone else- whether chatting about how our majors sculpt where we are headed next in life or over which is better- mc ewan or commons.

i don't care what you say, i love hamilton and i will continue to send them the $50 a year i can afford till i can afford more! :-)

excuses excuses

so the main reason i have not been writing is that i am focusing on my novel. did i tell you that i am going to be a famous american novelist?

carrie's word of the day

i like to think i have my own language. i make up words all the time. my friends can definitely attest to this. strangers have a hard time understanding me (so does my own mom, but i don't know if she counts because she's so far behind on the lexigon, ie, i heard her try and use the word bling the other day and i almost lost a lung laughing so hard). to try and rid the world of misunderstanding me (or not understanding me at all) i have decided to also use my blog to define the words in my wonky language*. here's the newest:

pro-cras-ti-surf-ing: the act of viewing various arbitrary websites as a means of avoiding what you really should be doing. eg: Carrie found the cutest shoes while she was procrastisurfing at work yesterday. Grant writing? What grant writing?

*feel free to add my words to your vocabulary, just make sure you know you heard it here first. :-)

absence makes the heart grow fungus

i always have loved the above quote from a bnl song. and sometimes i think it can be true. for instance, i have not written on my blog in a very very long time (in cyber world). thus, perhaps most people have stopped checking it. it seems to be that iffin you don't write every day, then people wipe you off their favourites list. bummer. guess i will just have to start writing more. :-)

not impressed

so, i am not too happy with the map of where i have been in the world. i know it has to be big to be able to fit everything in it, but it is so hard to see where i have actually been. and even though, yes, i have been to australia, i only went to melbourne really. this map makes it look like i wrote the travel book on it instead of bill bryson.

and i totally haven't been to the wicked north of north america. i want to, but that will come one day. for now, the furthest i have been is ottawa.

however, on a seperate note- me posting this map on my blog involved my first ever interaction with html! yay! yahoo! wee! aren't you excited for me. yes, all i did was copy and paste, but i am at least learning what it looks like a little.

not to mention, putting the maps up messed with the sidebar of my blog. maybe if i write more and more and more, they will eventually right themselves. if not, somegirl heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

where i've been in the world

where i was bound, but then i went

below are the states i have been too. above are the countries i have been too. a little cheesy and the maps are not all that great design-wise, but i thought i would make myself feel better about all i've seen in the world.

where i've been in america