In honour of yesterday’s post I have added a new warning category.  “Complete freak out”.  Yes for my loonier dump the crap moments I will now turn that category on as well as the “Adult Content” ie swearing and “Not while you’re eating” ie grim personal details about bodily functions coming soon, categories.

So.  After a long conversation with my Mum about how she hated being pregnant because it was frustrating annoying and painful, about how she administers stupid fingertip cuts that you can’t get wet with the annoying flappy bit of skin with her vegetable peeler on a semi-professional basis and how bloody annoying the organised people who ruin everything for the rest of us are (more on that story in a moment) I feel much better.

She also told me that in her day, the midwife came to see you every two weeks and your slot would be say… Tuesdays at 9.00 and would always be the same. Oh for such a simplistic approach these days.

As for the organised people… well I mean those people who even though they are pregnant still manage to hoist in that e-mailing the NCT woman, asking to go on the waiting list for antenatal classes and giving her your phone number, name, town of residence and e-mail address isn’t enough!

Sigh.

Looking at it, she did ask for my address so she could put me on the waiting list… but somehow I didn’t quite hoist in that I’d not go on without it and then Christmas loomed on the horizon and I got into my usual scrooge hissy fit/total panic and forgot about it until February. By that time, the organised women had got in and booked all the places.

Oh well.

Ballsed that one up then.

Not that I can do much about it.  And don’t give me any shit about complaining.  I do know I’m a complete pussy.

The other thing is that it would be nice if I could just ring up and book all the appointments I need right through from the point when I knew the pregnancy was viable. But you can only book a month in advance which, again, means that if you don’t get in on the first couple of days bookings open, you miss your slot.

Then there’s the scans, two and a half hours on hold waiting to book after they’d been closed for 9 days over Christmas and New Year only to be cut off.

Oh how I long for the days when they did the organising, slotted you in at a time convenient for them and you complied. The NHS is the worst of both, you are still given a slot at their convenience and have little scope to negotiate but you also have to remember to ring and book. Because it’s time critical I do get a little stressed I guess but yesterday was the first time I’ve had a full-on barking loop.

Then there’s guilt/socialising. You see, all my friends are older then me and they’re all being 40 and having huge parties in the months before the baby pops. We’ve even got two weddings to go to for god’s sake! We’ve not had a wedding in years and now, this year, when they’re going to be sodding tricky to get to, two! I’ve been invited on a hen weekend for the first time ever and the odds are I won’t be able to go.

The long and the short of it is, we are due on 1st June and we have the last three weekends in May left free (in case it comes early).

Every other weekend between now and then is already booked up. Even for us, that’s busy. Indeed we have one shot at buying the prams, cot, baby bath, changing station and general gubbins we need and it’s this coming weekend. After that, if we both want to go together and try the stuff out Mr BC will have to take a day off. At weekends there’s nothing. Nada, zilch.

Shit! Not the restful pregnancy we’d planned then. No wonder I lost my marbles yesterday!

We had planned to take a storage pod and get rid of some of the glass around the house and the things there won’t be room for if 1) Mr BC moves into my studio and 2) Mr BC’s office/our sitting room becomes Muffin’s bedroom/my studio.

We’ve packed everything up into boxes but so far, not had time to go down and open the pod. As we don’t have a weekend free I have no idea when we’re going to do this now… a little paternity leave a couple of days before the event I guess. Our hall is full of boxes. My office is full of boxes. There’s no room for any more and I can only lift about three of them.

Oops.

Still on the up side, we’ve solved the spare room problem so the rellies wanting to stay crisis is over. We’ll still try to persuade as many as possible to stay in the B&B opposite but at least we don’t get the whole minefield about whether they can afford to, whether they’ll be prepared to let us pay etc etc. So our sitting room/Mr BC’s office will become a bedroom/studio - small one’s bedroom, my studio - and Mr BC will move his office down to the building in the garden where my studio is now. Then this time next year, we’ll move.

Are other people this crap, I wonder?

Today’s action packed agenda includes rearranging the kitchen cupboards which is exactly as boring as it sounds - but needs done and will make Mr BC happy - and sketching out the first stages of a George. Which will be great because it’s only six letters but because his sister is Millie-Lucy I get to do him on a large piece of paper - lots of room for manoeuvre!

Perhaps I should also pencil in time for a brief fantasy about eating the contents of the fiat in this here photo. I took the picture in Bruges on our wee stress break a week or two ago and it’s actually meant to be a Valentine’s day heart, not the huge chocolate arse you might mistake it for at first glance! Although obviously, to me, flirting with the idea it’s an arse is much funnier - even if that makes the idea of eating it rather less alluring.

Enjoy…

I have SPD. Basically not all the muscles round my pelvis are working hard enough so as it gets looser in preparation for Muffin’s birth, it also chafes itself and gets painful. Apparently it’s giving too much because my back is stiff so first we must strengthen the muscles with exercises and then we can loosen the back to stop it reoccurring.

Annoying. I run around quite a bit normally, mainly because if I stop my back seizes up. I stopped exercising regularly at about week 9 because I was getting too morning sick. Surprise, surprise, my back’s seized up, something has to give and I’ve got SPD. Bugger.

They’ve given me a huge tubi-grip tube to wear to support the muscles. This is ace but is causing me fear. You see I’m pregnant, right? That means I’m very vague, I’m very vague anyway at the best of times. So… my worry is that I seem to have established a dangerous routine. It’s this.

I go to the loo. I pull down my trousers, then I pull down the tubi-grip and then I sit down.

One of those little “this-isn’t-quite-right” lights comes on at the back of my brain.

Ah yes. That’s it.

I’ve forgotten to pull down my pants.

Luckily, so far, I have always noticed before I’ve got comfortable and started my pee. However, I fear that if I don’t train myself into an automatic three tier removal system soon the inevitable is going to happen.

Second up something I found on the net this morning made me chuckle.

There’s a certain type of marketing where you get a whole page of information which, when you’ve read it and digested it, usually tells you very little more than how much money the person running “the business” is earning, the enormous amount by which it is increasing every month and an invitation to imagine what you could do with the same kind of earnings. The implication is that if you pay the joining fee and sign up to the scheme you, too could be rolling in the clover with them - or at least it is until you read their legal disclaimer page, always a good idea to read that first, I reckon but then, I’m cynical.

As I understand it, the important thing, for them, is to concentrate on what you want from the business rather than what’s involved, until you’ve paid anything from about $5 to $45 for information “worth thousands” or a set up pack which will allow you to set up a branch of the “business” of your own.

Looking at it from the outside, it seems to me that rather than any concrete sales, the making money part is often about rewards for your referrals, another percentage for any of their referrals and so on.

This means you are very likely to make a lot of money if you are at the top of the chain but the later you join the less you are likely to make. Usually only a handful of people make meaningful money out of ideas like this and everyone else makes a few pence or nothing at all.

Pitch the price for the information, set up pack etc at a reasonably small amount of money and the people who end up out of pocket will just shrug and think it didn’t work out. Even if they do feel cheated or that it wasn’t worth the money their mentality is most likely to be to let it go, that it’s not worth bothering over a few quid etc… Of course, for the people running the enterprise, everyone’s few quid soon adds up. It does for people who sign up for more than one of these schemes, too.

I am chuckling about this page here… Mainly because it looks like the exact same scam and the exact same technique only it’s selling something called; “Stop Being A Victim.” For $5 you too can learn the psychology behind this kind of recruiting and selling… and then you can put it into practise scamming public spiritedly selling an explanation of how the scam works to other people to ensure they don’t get scammed either.

Simple question. Isn’t anyone putting information like this out to STOP people getting scammed going to do it for free - or give you the basics and ask for a donation of few quid to cover their site admin expenses?

I’m thinking computer programmes like AVG free edition virus checker or Spybot Search and Destroy and the like. Ok these are computer tools but they are free - you can upgrade one to a paid version, the other asks for a donation towards running costs.

The thing is, both are updated regularly. Write a book about how scammers scam and yes, it’s hard work but when it’s done, it’s done. Write and distribute a free virus or spyware checker and you will have to keep it updated on an ongoing basis. A similar amount of work to writing a book but without an end. Yet, both these high maintenance applications - and many similar - are provided without charge.

Yet on the Stop Being a Victim page, the Online Business Alliance (who wrote the content or at least it’s copyrighted to them) use exactly the same techniques as the scammers use, ostensibly while offering to “help” you learn how not to be scammed by this particular marketing scam. That is, they spend about 500 words telling you how much money your public spiritedness is going to make you if you pay them $5. Because obviously, you don’t just buy the information, right? No! You sign up and sell it on, yourself, under your own affiliate scheme.

Obviously you’re not doing this to earn money although…

“this industry is one of the few where one can write their own check in terms of earnings, “

(Don’t forget people, they’re not scamming you or trying to raise your expectations, this is a quote from the earnings disclaimer page which clearly states that they’re not responsible if you earn bugger all!)

No! You’re not going to be doing this to “write your own check”! You’re doing it to help people.

Yeh right.

Smell a rat? I reckon you should.

The best bit is the aforementioned legal disclaimers page which takes five paragraphs all written in capitals - ie shouted - to say, essentially, “we’re earning stacks of money doing this but don’t think that means you will.” Any site with one page of content to three legal has got to raise a few questions among the sane. Apart from the one page hard sell you can find a disclaimer, earnings disclaimer, child protection law compliance statement, privacy notice, anti spam policy and terms of use… hmm you might even be able to class that as one page hard sell to six legal…

They give you a preview - it’s a pdf so give it a minute or two to load. This is a short summary of the things which will be covered in detail when you pay your $5 to sign up. It also happens to be comprehensive summary of what you will need to know to set up a scam of your own and looking at it you can’t help thinking that the marketing material you are reading follows it to the letter.

In other words, it looks like a how to scam school disguised as a how not to be scammed school for legal reasons. Obviously this is my view the people behind this may have the best of intentions.

However, if they do, why do they choose to present themselves in exactly the same way as the people they claim to be helping us to avoid? Might it be that they feel the only way to help the suckers is to market to them in a language they understand? My US friends, you can tell me whether that’s just how marketing is done over the pond. Here in the UK the usual consensus is that anything requiring a sell that desperate and that hard has got to be flawed.

The whole thing is a bit like a tabloid kiss and tell which describes some torrid celebrity affair in intimate detail for the titillation and pleasure of the readers but is disguised as a condemnation of the protagonists so the paper can print and you can read with a clear social conscience.

A scam disguised as a crusade against itself? Another cheap trick to rip off the monumentally stupid? Elegant. If a little unethical.

Then again via my ferreting about with their links, I have stumbled upon something called lulu.com - a self publishing site, kind of like zazzle perhaps, only for writers. Now that might actually turn out be worth five dollars!

I have been playing with Zazzle and I have made… THIS! Yes, it’s my look like a trucker, feel like a trucker comedy bump cover! If you’re pregnant and a bit warped you may think this is cool… then again, you may not be me, in which case you’ll be staring at it and going, “uh?”

My only small gripe is that I wish the print went a bit lower, the face will start over my boobs and what I ultimately want is for it to be exactly where the bump is. Never mind, you can’t have it all. I’ve sent off for it, anyway!

Space Hopper Maternity T-shirt
by
Drawnbyhand
Get this custom shirt
at Zazzle

I know, two posts in one day, what an excess! It’s just that I laughed so much when I read this that I nearly weed in my pants! So I had to share it with you IMMEDIATELY!

Thank you Liberrydwarf for this one…

Click on this link for a real corker! Barking Looner dot com

I kid you not this is a serious article from some very misguided person who believes they are doing God’s work and who has actually managed to convince himself that the duckbilled platypus is Satan’s spawn. Me, I think some of what the Taliban has to say is less looney, more logical and better thought out.

How can he be a fundamentalist and then conveniently forget that bit in Genesis where it says God made ALL the creatures ? How could anyone with a brain and capacity for rational thought, doubt and all the other things St Paul encourages us to tackle head on be like this? How could he read the New Testament and not realise he’s one of the Pharisees? Oh no wait, people like this don’t read the New Testament, it says all sorts of inconvenient things about whited sepulchres and treating other people the way you’d like to be treated yourself… it even hints that damning people is God’s job… oooh no, can’t have that. Inciting others to hate them is too much fun.

I believe people are not inherently evil. We do silly misguided things, we do wrong and there’s evil in us but we’re not intrinsically evil… I’m almost willing to make an exception for this guy, though! What a spanner!

This is why the rest of the world thinks the entire American nation is absolutely barking mad, every man jack of ‘em and that’s so not fair and so not true. WRONG and a great pity… but when an American does go nuts they just seem to be able to put the rest of the world to shame!

Can’t they do something about people like this… bar them from the internet or have them certified or something (not difficult surely)? The whole thing reads like something out of the Simpsons…

Never mind, chuckle away me-hearties.  I did!

Ever had something happen to you that seems like comedy gold until you write it up. Hmm… me too but never mind! Please read on…

The weekend passed off very well, despite my fears, fabulous dinner last night, big lunch today and a fine evening on Friday - the entertainment was excellent, a kind of four poofs and a piano band, called Cantabile and Ronnie Corbet. Even the food, mass catering though it may have been,was excellent.

My only complaint - and it’s very small - was that spike heals are not the most practical of garments to walk/run briskly round London in.

Ok so when I lived there I frequently used to run about in spike heels but I was a lot younger then and I didn’t have such dodgy knees or soggy pregnant lady’s cartiledge… and… um… the spikes fitted me better then. I also noticed some interesting effects - possibly contributed to by the early pregnant lady shape on my um… underwear.

A few years ago, I had, I think, the funniest text message I have ever received from a lady friend informing me that she was on a packed commuter train for which she had been compelled to run and once on, trapped amongst ranks of standing commuters she realised something was tickling her ankles and as a bloke sitting near her smirked and pointed* that worse, it was her pants which had fallen down in the pursuit.

On the way to the station, Mr BC and I were giggling about this - partly because for two smart (one black tie and one plain smart) evening dos we had both worried about whether or not anything we had would fit and I had, indeed, discovered that my choice was limited to a third pair of trousers I can get into (just) and an elasticated skirt with a velvet jacket which, though under extreme tension in the bust area - if the buttons went it would definitely be with enough force to blind somebody - did, just about do up. The other reason for the giggling was because after finding I’d put away about five pairs of hold ups with ladders in, I’d had to resort to stockings with a suspender belt which is a bit crap and tends to ping undone allowing my stockings to gently subside to ankle level.

Unfortnately I had chosen what I call a chafing combo. My bag, a back pack because I was taking some of my cards down to my parents, was rubbing against my coat which was rubbing against my jacket which was gradually coiling my skirt up about my waist. Hmm… lucky I chose a long winter coat then.

Once in London we tubed to Holborn and decided to walk to the venue. It was an interesting experience in the shoes but it was as we turned into Chancery Lane, where our final destination lay, I realised more than the shoes was awry. As well as the skirt riding up, which it was, albeit out of public view under the winter coat, my pants were riding down… worse, my super-duper, new improved exercise honed small bum, combined with the distinctly humpty-ish nature of my ever expanding muffin top was not proving a large enough obstruction to stop the suspender belt following it. By hoicking it all up while nobody was looking I finally made it to the dinner without losing my er…. modesty but only by nipping straight to the loo, removing the offending pants and passing the rest of the evening commando was I able to avoid further… unpleasantness.

The suspender belt nearly fell down again on the way home but thankfully, not in London, where we got a taxi to King’s Cross but on the way home from the station in my home town. Hmm… I will have to throw it away.

*What an unchivalrous bastard!