Metabolism Through the Years

So, Maggie, what have you been doing? Well, friends, I have been asleep. In addition, I have been preparing snacks. And then there’s all the eating and resting I’ve been up to.

Also, I’ve been sharing embarrassing photos of myself in high school on heavily trafficked Web sites. Head over to check out my high-waist Daisy Dukes and my worried-looking glamour shot.

However, I must say, after spending months waddling around with a carton of ice cream in my hand, it’s hard to feel embarrassed about any photo in which I weighed roughly 63 pounds. Not impossible, but hard.

Pregnancy Doesn’t Suck, Part 3

Ever since you can remember, whenever pregnancy comes up, someone offers a worst-case scenario. Women terrify you with tales of endless nausea, constant irritation, ballooning, swelling, facial skin discoloration. They proffer a string of “just you waits.” You begin to seriously consider adoption.

When you get pregnant, the stories only intensify. Disfiguring stretch marks, preeclampsia, debilitating mood swings.

You wait, and wait, and wait. None of the things you’ve always dreaded actually come to pass. The things that kept you awake at night, things that cost you hours and hours of worry, none of it happens. In fact, to you, pregnancy feels pretty natural.

You find these women, the women who needlessly terrified you, and beat them senseless with your handbag.

“I’m so sorry,” you say afterward. “I’m suffering from debilitating mood swings.”

Book Update

Lately, Matthew Baldwin of Defective Yeti is posting like crazy, and he’s been pulling a few ideas from my book, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog. Here’s my favorite 100 Ideas-inspired post so far. Never underestimate the power of acid wash jeans and red suspenders to make your heart go pitter-pat.

Meanwhile, Jeff Veen, user experience guru for Google, mentioned my book in a discussion of how the web is turning amateurs into experts, and tools like Vox and my book are helping on that front.

Blogging expert Leah Peterson is playing along by asking readers to submit something via mail for inclusion in a group painting. She has a P.O. box for submissions, so send something her way.

Finally David Beach, formerly of Yahoo Shopping and now with Wink, is still hard at work whittling his body down and upping his health quotient at Die Old. I mentioned Beach in the book because I’m pretty inspired by what he’s doing. Go on over and lend a helpful comment. It would be great to see him build a community around the idea of dying old.

That’s it for now. If you haven’t bought the book, I hope you do, as I think you’ll like it. If you have, please link to your 100 Ideas posts in the comments. I can’t wait to read them.

Yikes! Not Our Baby.

So, I have to be more careful. The baby in my daily photo (now removed) was a friend’s sweet baby from our birthing class. Not our baby, reapeat, not our baby. Rest assured, when I am no longer pregnant, you will know definitively that the baby you’re looking at is ours, as I will be shouting from the rooftops.

Meanwhile, I am still pregnant. Pregnant enough that I’m expecting a little plastic turkey thermometer to pop out of my tummy at any moment. Sorry about that. Please enjoy the new photo of a great pie place in the Mission.

Nesting: the Nursery

Me painting, originally uploaded by MaggieMason.

Bryan and I adore our spacious, reasonably priced, one-bedroom apartment, so instead of moving when I got pregnant we decided to convert the breakfast nook (my old office) into a nursery. I have a photo set going to record the process.

So far, we added doors to the arched entryway, Bryan tore down a wall of mirrors and painted the room (twice, as the first color looked like a Tiffanys explosion), and we enlisted some friends to help paint this bubble mural on one wall. We’re going for a nautical, 1950s Illustrated Encyclopedia look.

Here’s how we did the mural, easy peasy:

-The design is from a letterpress card that we love. I photographed it with my digital camera, discarded the color info in Photoshop, and turned the contrast way up.

– We borrowed a projector from Bryan’s office (Thanks, Adaptive Path!), and plugged it in to my computer. We opened the image in Photoshop and moved the projector around until the image fit the whole wall.

– I tried painting a single circle with a paintbrush, and it took forever. Our friend Rachel suggested using common household items (like glasses, bottles, tins) to stamp the bubbles. She is a genius.

– We filled paper plates with paint and got to stamping. Before marking the wall, we tested potential stampers on a piece of paper to be sure they’d work well. Glasses with wider lips seemed to work best. With Ryan and Rachel’s help the whole thing only took about 45 minutes.

-We ordered pizza.

Espionage

ESPIONAGE

Originally uploaded by MaggieMason.

For half an hour, I wandered around with my giant Cannon hanging off my neck. I took dozens of photos with a loud CHA-CHICK each time. As I aimed my lens at yet another bin of confections, the storekeeper said, “I’m sorry. I can’t allow you to take photos here.” I jerked up, my face burning, to find that she was actually talking to a woman who had just wandered in. The woman was aiming her tiny digital elf at friend who was grinning in front of a colorful gum display.

Doot-dee-doo.