(Click here for larger and more impressive version)

Um… yeah. Methinks they had a little unplanned adventure and that just might have contributed to their lateness…

So today someone had to be home all day so that a package could be delivered via UPS 2nd Day Air. It’s no biggie, but it’s annoying to have to make sure someone’s upstairs to hear the door so that it can be signed for etc., and since T and I are out for a large portion of tomorrow, it’s important that I get the stuff today.

(N.B. It’s just some train reservations, not a Wii, sadly…)

So. I check on the packages from the UPS website most of the day. OUT FOR DELIVERY from 4:44 am on, it says. So, of course, I’m sure I’ll get it today, especially since it was expedited service, right?

7 pm rolls around. Still no package, and so I call the 1-800 number. I mean, 7 pm is after the close of the business day, isn’t it?

Apparently not. Apparently my package is still out for delivery, and could come as late as 8 pm.

Fine… we leave the front door open, and meanwhile, we get the baby ready for bed. There’s someone near the front door at all times.

Then, at 8:30, T is finally in bed. I half-expect there to be a notice taped to the door, since I closed it for the 20 minutes it took to rock him down (2 meters from the door, btw) and this is a trick they’ve pulled before… sneaking up to the doorstep and putting a notice on the door while we’re here without knocking… but no, there’s nothing.

So I check the website. Apparently, they tried to deliver the packages at 7:56 and no one was here.

Except that at 7:56 our front door was open and there was someone sitting right next to it.

LYING BASTARDS.

So I call the 1-800 number and complain. Their excuse is that “oh, the driver tried to deliver to the wrong address” (let’s say my address is 22 Apple Road, which it is not, but it’s similar. The address they claim they tried to deliver to was like 700 E. 1st St. GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK – it just happens that 4 minutes before they break their price guarantee they make a delivery attempt to the wrong address which is in no way similar??? I might add that this was probably the last stop on his route on the way to my place, since that’s about a mile away, but COME ON…).

My recourse? Um, I can have them type in a message to send a complaint to the local office.

NOT ENOUGH, UPS.

You guys suck.

I’m going to notify the sender and have them try to get their money back, because damnit, if I have to pay that much for postage, I’m not going to pay to be lied to.

This house just gets too damned hot in the summer. *sigh*

Seriously, with all the money you guys are making, you could do at least that much.

I’m sick. As in coming down with a bad, bad cold.

And I teach tomorrow.

And Thursday.

And I have a paper due Thursday morning.

Sick.

Grrrr.

I win.

Disclaimer: this is a rant, like most of my political posts are. For the record, I do not speak for or represent the Obama or Clinton campaigns in any way, and I reserve the right to be a righteous biatch and censor comments I find offensive

Also, please note the following two important points before reading:

1. This may sound like I somehow discount the views of all Clinton supporters, which is not the case; I have lifelong friends who support Clinton and whose opinions I respect, even if I disagree with their points of view.
   
2. In this rant, I discuss a particular kind of Clinton supporter I have encountered frequently in the past couple of months and seen representing the campaign on many political shows. However, I want there to be no misunderstanding – while I discuss supporters who fall into one of the main Clinton demographics, that is, women 55-65, I do not mean that I have a problem with, disrespect, or dislike the vast majority of people who fall into this group. I am making an observation about some of her supporters who fall into this age/gender group, which, while perhaps controversial, in no way reflects my general views on anyone other than those specifically described.

Apparently, Greg Craig, a former Clinton administration official from the State Department, has finally hit on the issue with Hillary Clinton’s “experience” that has been driving me nuts ever since she announced her candidacy: that is, because she was married to the president, she has presidential experience.

Now, my husband is a computer science professor, and my father is a chemistry professor. I’ve spent my life around those in academia, and I spent enough time in graduate school to have a pretty good understanding of how it all works. I don’t, however, have the requisite experience to be a professor myself – that is, I don’t have a PhD. I have an M.S., and all of the coursework and a good start on a dissertation for a PhD in linguistics, but I don’t have the PhD.

So if I apply for a professorial position based on the fact that I’ve been intimately exposed to the academic life and have some of the experience necessary to get a PhD, even though I don’t have one, in most fields I will be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.

So how is this any different? Why does no one ever talk about this? Craig says Clinton is grossly exaggerating her role in the Northern Ireland peace process, and geez, how is this a surprise? It’s only new that someone who should know is actually saying something about it.

My theory is that it has something to do with the nature of a large majority (or at least the visible majority) of Clinton supporters, and note that this isn’t due to what I’ve read in polls or political analysis – it’s what I saw at my precinct’s caucus and the county Democratic convention where I was a delegate.

Not to say that there weren’t other people supporting Clinton, or that there weren’t more than a few women at or around the age of 60 supporting Obama, but the vast majority of women my mother’s age were rabid, and I do mean rabid, Clinton supporters. Before anyone jumps on my case, let me explain exactly what I mean here.

The bizarre thing about a caucus, for anyone who lives in a primary state, is that secret voting is not allowed. Not only do you see who everyone is voting for, but you are allowed to speak for a few minutes on behalf of your candidate. While you are not allowed to actually debate, you can respond to what has been said before you to some degree. And in my precinct, the precinct captain for the Clinton campaign and a few of her supporters were, from the get-go, pushy. Pushy, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this, really rude. They got up and explained how they’d been waiting their whole lives for this (the implication being, however subtle they thought they were being, that they wouldn’t live long enough to see their dream of a woman president fulfilled by someone else), and how Hillary was just a gem, and… then they each just echoed the talking points. “Ready from Day One”, and “vetted”, and “experience”, and… blah blah. We’ve all heard it by now.

But the surprising part was how aggressive, and dare I say, mean some of them were. One of them, just before the actual vote, actually came up and got up in the face of one of the Obama supporters and in her most intimidating screech said, “So, young man, have you changed your mind about Hillary Clinton now that you’ve heard about her experience and how ready she is?” And he, with wide eyes, said that no he hadn’t, and repeated something about her Iraq war vote, something that drove many of us present to Obama.

I would say I’m a feminist, though not a feminazi, and I was so repulsed by the righteous anger rolling off of some of the supporters that it only reinforced my dislike of the candidate in general (and she is much more likeable than those supporters present at my caucus, I promise). Let it not be said that I don’t have some understanding of what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world – I worked in a male-dominated field, and from time to time would run across those who thought I was in my position only because I lacked dangly bits between my legs – but I’m not so rabidly angry about it that I want to tear the eyes out of anyone who doesn’t think every woman publicly trying to break the glass ceiling is a gift from God.

And then I went to the county convention, and Christ, it wasn’t just my caucus, it was a bit less than a third of the damned room (giving credit for those Clinton supporters who were normal human beings). It got so that I could almost always tell who supported what candidate before I ever got close enough to see the candidate preference on someone’s credentials. Female and between 55-65? Clinton. White male of any age? If alone or with another man, Obama. If with his wife, often Clinton. Under 50? Almost all Obama, with a few women going for Clinton. Over 65? Generally Obama.

But, as usual, I digress. My theory, such as it is, relates, as I said, to the nature of her supporters (and her campaign); those women who scared the crap out of me at my caucus? They scare the crap out of everybody. And I just couldn’t understand why they were being so rude – we were all impassioned, sure, but the Obama supporters were uniformly personally civil.

And then, talking with another female Obama supporter at the convention, we hit upon what made sense to us: those women think they’ve earned this. They think they deserve it, and damnit, no one is going to take it away from them, and definitely not these Obama kids.

And so why do I think that Clinton’s been given a free ride on the experience card? Because everyone is too afraid to say anything that might sound like “she was just the president’s wife“, for fear of being bitten by one of these particular supporters I describe, because their way of getting what they want is to bully their way into getting it. I’m sure it’s absolutely what they had to do in the 60′s and 70′s to be taken seriously, but it’s as if the only tool they have is a hammer, and everything they see is a nail. And the hammer is really, really intimidating.

But Hillary Clinton, for all of her life and career experience, was not the president, she was not a cabinet member, she was not a member of the State Department, and she did not have security clearances. She was a lawyer, probably an excellent one, and I have no doubt she was and is eminently competent – but as far as executive experience goes, she was just the president’s wife.

Just as, however good a programmer and analyst I may be, and however much I’ve seen as the wife and daughter of professors, I may be eminently competent at what I do, but I cannot claim professorial experience. Nor, for the sake of argument, can my husband claim to have been a systems engineer or a linguistics instructor just because I’ve been one, however awesome he is.

It’s a stupid, stupid argument, and I’m glad someone’s calling her on it, even if it means risking the righteous flaming wrath of the female demographic between the ages of 55-65. I wish the press would do it more often. If we’re going to talk about free rides from the press, let’s have it be an equal opportunity free ride.

For the record, I personally agree wholeheartedly with Susan Sarandon on Hillary: “There’s absolutely no reason why a woman shouldn’t be in that office, but I am not sure about this woman.”

ETA: Apparently, according to Jonathan Alter and some of the reporting on Olbermann tonight, many people in Congress involved in the drafting the SCHIP children’s health care legislation which Hillary is taking so much credit for are similarly upset with her claims and are stating that she is grossly overstating her involvement there as well. Surprise, surprise.

Anyhow, here’s an update on the whole breastfeeding business, post-lactation clinic visit yesterday…

The good news is that Torsten gained 3 ounces in the 2.5 days since the doctor’s visit, which is about exactly right. This means that when he gets enough food, he gains just fine.

The more difficult news is that it means either it’s his suck or my production – since I have hypothyroidism, it’s probably the latter. However, there is stuff that can be done – I’m trying fenugreek now, and as of this morning, it certainly seemed to have had an effect, but if it doesn’t, I have a prescription for Reglan which can be used to increase milk production, particularly in people with hormonal problems, so it looks like we may have a way forward.

In the meantime, he took in about 1.75 ounces in the feeding we measured yesterday, so we’re going to continue to supplement him at the level we were doing while I was doing the insane pumping B.S., and hope that he continues to gain. I’ll go in weekly to see about how much he’s taking in at a feeding (more or less) and we’ll adjust the plan accordingly. This kid is back on the breast. And as for pumping, I can’t put up with it after every feed, so I’ll be doing what’s called a “power hour” every day or every other day to increase production.

It’s still a pain, but at least we’re moving forward… and I think we’ve managed to intervene before someone drags us too far down the formula path. The lactation consultants were much more present than they were while I was in the hospital, and I think we’ll either conquer this or give it a good college try. The important thing is that Torsten should now be getting enough food and he is gaining.

God, am I tired… (and to the friends who’ve given me advice, particularly the one who thought I was upset about it because I haven’t had the time or energy to answer, thanks – it is much appreciated, and I’m not upset with anyone…)

I haven’t been writing much, although I’ve started a couple of posts and stopped.

I have a newborn at home. So sue me.

I still intend to write about Torsten’s birth, but unfortunately, I’ve been consumed by other things.

See, Torsten was born at 7 lbs, 12 oz. A respectable weight, though not huge by any means. However, he lost almost a pound in the hospital – we left the hospital on day 4, and only then did my milk come in, so he really didn’t have any chance to gain weight before we left. No one seemed worried – that is, until an hour before we were to check out from the hospital, when health care was basically transferring over from the hospital to our HMO. And then the freakout began, because it was more than 10% of his body weight (never mind that he’d only had colostrum for 3 days and had output a huge amount of meconium shortly after birth for the first several days), and that magic percentage sets off the magic red flashing lights.

Now, all newborns lose some weight after birth, and formula-fed infants gain back their weight quicker, but the doctors expect all infants to gain back their birth weight by 14 days. Given that infants are expected, on average, to gain an ounce a day, I suppose we were screwed from the start on this, since little guy only had 9 days to gain before his 2-week appointment, but nevertheless, the HMO nurse practitioner at the hospital and the home care nurses that came to visit us twice have made it a mission, and piling that stress on top of learning to breastfeed hasn’t been fun.

Add to that that instead of recognizing that my milk was just starting to come in as we left the hospital, they freaked and decided I had a supply problem, I was supposed to be pumping and supplementing after each feed. Given that newborns feed every 2-3 hours, and this little guy feeds for a long time, doing that on top of breastfeeding meant all I was doing for those first days home was feeding Torsten. Not sleeping, and, stupidly, not eating very well beyond what Christian fed me (and he did a great job, but I did need to eat more).

Oh, and did I mention I’m recovering from a c-section?

Yeah. Major abdominal surgery. It sucked.

Anyway, those first few days home were really bad – I was actually nearly passing out when I fed Torsten or pumped, and it was scaring me. Since I’m a little anemic from blood loss during surgery, we thought it was that, but experience has shown it was a combination of not having time to eat well and so much freaking feeding plus pumping.

Somebody should have mentioned to me that if my milk came in like gangbusters (which it did), the pumping was perhaps not a great idea.

But then again, given that I tried to get the lactation consultant to help me for two days in the hospital and she only showed the night before I left because the nurse dragged her ass into my room, why should I expect that anyone was actually paying attention?

So. Anyhow. We had home nurses come by to weigh Torsten, check him out, and check on his jaundice, as well as to check my incision. I do think that’s a pretty awesome thing my HMO does, but I should also mention that all it managed to do in the end was make me worry more about Torsten’s weight, never mind that he was still gaining. (Of course, we were supplementing with donor milk and some of what I’d pumped, but he was doing well…)

We still had no idea how he was doing weight-wise until we saw the pediatrician at his two-week appointment, though, and while he’s gained 9 ounces from his low weight leaving the hospital (an ounce a day, as desired), he’s still only up to 7 lbs, 5.2 oz, so I am still worried, because they are apparently still worried, even though it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be. Maybe it’s because the pediatrician wants to see him again next week for a weight check, I don’t know. But since we only supplement him maybe once a day now (and then only when he seems to be eating forever in the evening), I worry that my body somehow isn’t providing for him properly, and that’s getting me down.

Because what they say about children is true – once you have them, you don’t want to see anything bad happen to them ever, and you would do absolutely anything for them. (Note to the first person who breaks Torsten’s heart: your arse has my foot’s name all over it, so you’d better run now…) So the idea that I might somehow be undernourishing him or anything that might hurt him has been making me sick with worry.

The funny thing about the whole breast business is that I’m pretty sure my current problem is oversupply – for a while he was eating forever and extremely frequently, and one day he didn’t have a bowel movement all day (he’d been a textbook outputter up to then) until this green mess came out of him that evening – a textbook sign of getting too much foremilk and not enough hindmilk, from what I’ve been able to read, that that often happens with oversupply (also, he’s um… afraid of the torrent that he’s deluged with when he starts feeding, so I think that’s a pretty good guess). And too much foremilk (low in fat, high in sugars and protein, lower in calories) and not enough hindmilk (high fat) often leads to poor weight gain.

And so I’m frustrated. Maybe we don’t even have a problem and I’m just superparanoid because I’m a first-time mom and I love my baby and I’m so ticked off with our medical care (they’ve been so little help with breastfeeding – and, IMHO, a hindrance – that I sort of wonder if the formula companies are paying them…), but I really want our little guy to be ok. And he probably is – he looks fine, the jaundice liver test they ran on him yesterday came back negative and his bilirubin levels are nowhere near treatment levels, and he is gaining weight.

But I’m still stuck in this worried mood – I admit it, I’ve cried a lot – because when we left the hospital, they sprung this worry on me and every time we have contact with the medical establishment they reinforce it.

And it’s kind of keeping me from enjoying my wonderful, sweet, adorable little boy, and I really, really resent that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t adore and enjoy him – I do – but it’s made it harder to concentrate on that and that makes me pretty mad. He’s a cool little kid.

Anyway, a better post should come soon – it’s just that this has been seriously on my mind.

Baby is well otherwise, as are we.

So there are these curtains – roman shades, really – I’m supposed to have been working on forever. We have this house, you see, with very oddly-sized windows, and since the outer walls are just masonry – outside brick exposed to the inside directly, in fact – mounting regular curtains into what are effectively cut-outs for the windows seemed to be a real pain-in-the-butt idea when we first moved in. In retrospect, I was on crack, but what can you do? Anyway, I have in fact finished many of them (our living and dining rooms, for example, and all done finally – they were mostly done a year ago, but I didn’t finish the raising-and-lowering mechanisms until a few weeks ago), but the ones for our bedroom have been on hold for some time, and with as cold as that room gets, it’s about time to get them done, hopefully before Small Monster gets here. They’re nice and insulated and keep out light well, and I know that’s going to be important, since he’ll be in our room for some time. We do not want a Small-Monstercicle.

Now you may be asking why it is that all of the curtains in the front rooms are done before our bedroom, when one might think bedroom curtains were *ahem* a bit more important, but let’s just say I had a guest last Christmas that was demanding in no uncertain terms that they be up before s/he arrived because s/he was staying in the living room. And since I have always had some fear of this person’s wrath and irritation (and I was trying to be as good a host as I could be under the circumstances), they got done.

And now here it is, a year later, and I haven’t bothered with the shades in our own room, and we like, need them. Yesterday.

Thing is, I just don’t want to do it. And pregnant me wants to do it sooooo much less. I don’t really want to do anything, to be honest, except that sitting still hurts. So does moving. Late pregnancy is fun, folks!

I mean, regular curtains are easy (or easier) – line a sheet and hem it – but I am hardly a seamstress, and I have real trouble cutting out large rectangles of cloth evenly. Seriously. I suck at it. I’m not even sure how it’s really supposed to be done. The sewing part I don’t mind as much, but the cloth cutting?

I suck.

And since I have to lay out these rolls of lining on the ground and get down on my hands and knees to measure and cut – great position for baby, rotten position for heavy mama whose wrists hurt – I have totally been putting it off forever.

A great friend of mine mentioned yesterday that maybe the novel was my pre-labor nesting, but this strong internal command that I get these curtains done in the next couple of days sounds more like it to me. With my luck, my water will break all over the place while I’m cutting out material tonight, but I don’t think I’d complain except that the curtains just wouldn’t get done.

Bah. So anyway, there will be little blogging tonight, and no noveling beyond the 1k I pushed out earlier just for the Hell of it. I’m gonna get these MoFos done, darnit.

Yayyyyyyyy!

But I am woefully behind on writing and blog-reading. Oh soooooooooooooo woefully behind. Part of this is busyness, part of this is being tired and in some pain, and part of it was, frankly, some annoyance that the perpetrators of the FFD™ (something that I am finally starting to get past through sheer force of will) are getting rather persistent about trying to read my blog in order to find out what’s going on with me. The key word here is trying, but eventually they will succeed because I simply don’t have the obsession, energy or time to think so much about them that I remain ever-vigilant about them reading a public blog, and as long as I don’t know about it and they don’t bother me, I don’t really care. But for the moment, I do find it rather creepy and annoying that people who I’ve said quite clearly that I’m done with and who have in turn told me never to contact them again (um… why would I want to????) can’t stop trying to get the details of my life anyway. It’s like, move on, people. Make your decisions, accept the consequences, and move on. I’m not taking my blog down (or moderating my comments very much) for their sake, but geez… it’s uncomfortably like being stalked.

Anyhow, I didn’t intend to go off on that, but it certainly does get my creep on.

And now, to the shout-out portion of our program:

NaNoWriMo-sters!!!!: This weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) is big-assed NaNo catchup weekend (presuming Small Monster doesn’t decide to enter the world). To my NaNo peeps who’ve been keeping up, I challenge you to write the number of additional words I have to make up before Sunday at midnight between now and the end of the weekend – 14884! (I’m evil, aren’t I?) And for those who are behind, let us all join in solidarity and get caught up, even if we have to add clowns in buttless leather chaps to our stories to get things moving (“Hmmm… how do I integrate that into a historical romance?”).

Hot Blogging Chicks!: To my favorite bloganistas, I will get caught up eventually in reading your fine writing, although if you can convincingly integrate clowns in buttless leather chaps to your ongoing narrative, I will be much more likely to catch up quickly, probably spewing tea onto my monitors. I will also give you extra points, although if one of my monitors shorts out as a result of the tea, I will have to take those points back

God I need sleep. I’m so going to regret posting that last bit later, aren’t I?

ETA: Ok, so there is a German final, but, eh, I can do that at home and make my husband deliver it anyhow once I’m done with it