Yes today has been a GOOD one.

Slept well, including one stint of a whole four hours without waking up and headed out to aqua-natal. It was a given we were all having coffee after - brilliant, I haven’t been able to persuade anyone to do that before so it’s obviously improved over the 3 weeks I’ve missed.

During our lengthy chat - very nice and sociable - one woman said I could get free re-usable nappies from the council, I rang and sure enough I am now the proud owner of 4 brand-new medium sized Motherese Rikki outer pants, 4 little pants made by someone else but they look pretty good, 12 terry cloth foldy things to go inside them, 600 biodegradeable liners (!) and a nappy pail. So combined with the stuff I already have that’s another item ticked on the must have list.

Even better, with the ones I have already bought at a car boot - used once, sterilised by the seller and then twice more by me - I now have the prerequisite 24 sets of nappies with a blessed 4 of the terry cloths in hand so yes, I’ve also sorted my muslin squares. All this stuff would be about £230 or more new and I’ve spent the grand total of £7 for £188’s worth and scored the rest absolutely free.

Booyacka!

I guess the moral of this story is that help comes from the most unexpected of places.  Who’d have thought that if you want some free nappies, the thing to do was ask your local council.

I’ve also managed to get rid of the giant computer which was cluttering up my office… god bless Freecycle and all who sail in her! I’ve got at least five takers on that one and I’m very pleased as it means I will have a new place to start storing my boxes of packed stuff ahead of our smashing attic floor-o-rama.

On to my next topic.

Dreams.

I dreamt a lot the other night. I can’t remember all of them but a couple spring to mind, one because it was possibly the bizarrest thing I’ve ever dreamt and the other because I remembered it. I wear a couple of those bead bangles, a brown one - tiger’s eye, a whatever volcanic glass is called (can’t remember) and amethyst. I dreamt I lost them the other day and found them… wait for it…

Yes…

Up my arse!

I had to pull them out and wash them off before I could put them back on.

How fricking odd is that?

I also dreamed some very good looking and most buff hunk wanted to shag me but all I wanted was to shag Mr BC. Mr BC didn’t want to shag me though, which is par for the course, he doesn’t at the moment, I freak him out. He is clearly not into shagging truckers. It’s that kind of wank seance thing, too where you feel like the baby is watching. Even so, he was clearly happy when I told him about it and that despite feeling a bit of nooky would be nice I only wanted it with him.

That said, of course, although I’d kind of like a bit of bedroom action er… on paper, so to speak, when it actually comes to it (phnar phnar) I feel less in the mood for sex than I ever have in my life. I ache too much, if you’ve ever tried to have a shag after some major surgery or at least, when some bit of your bod is really hurting, you’ll know you think it sounds like a great idea until you try and then find it’s not really all it’s cracked (gnurk) up to be.

Sorry. Channelling Finbarr Saunders there.

Yes they are. A brief hiaitus, I promised, a fermata, small pause… and a week passed… and another…

I’m sorry but I’m having a bit of a why me? Week. Be warned the adult content ie swearing warning system, is switched on.

I’m sure everyone else’s lives are the same as mine, you plan stuff and something goes wrong and you have to do that instead. I’m sure that’s what life is… it’s just that I live under the impression that sometimes, other people’s lives do actually go the way they plan. Especially the ORGANISED ones. The way it looks from here, in the pit of disorganised pandemonium, naturally, they plan, they book, it happens and all is peachy.

When I emulate them, I plan, I book, something else happens, I cancel and all is tits up. No wonder everyone thinks I’m so fucking good in a crisis! My whole life comprises one crisis after another and if they’re not my own, I seem to have this uncanny knack of getting sucked into other people’s.

Sigh.

You know what’s coming don’t you.

Yeh. SOMETHING has happened to the woman THINGS happen to. A family crisis.

So I’ve been trying to sort out the final bits of baby stuff as it’s 36 weeks next week and you never know! Trouble is, SPD being tricky some days, shopping is a trial, plus I can only just squeeze into my car without the aid of swarfega - well actually I can squeeze in it’s getting out I can’t do and if it would stop fucking raining for ONE day when I have to go somewhere I’d take the lid off and all I’d have to do is stand up. Yesterday? Warm. Bright sun. Today, pissing with rain because I have physio. Sigh. But I digress.

Stuff. That’s where I was. Yeh, well, I’m ordering it all off the internet which means, ideally, I need to be at home for at least 7 days after I place each order to ensure I’ll be there to receive it.

Post is fine, it sits in the depot round the corner until I go collect it but with couriers they tend to try once and then bugger off. If you’re lucky they keep it for three days before sending it back to whoever sent it to you but even if you arrive home in time you still have to slog off to their depot, usually about 50 miles away, to pick it up.

Clearly if you’re not home for seven straight working days for two months or more, ordering off the internet turns into a game of courier chicken.  At the moment the couriers are winning.

Sigh.

Two months of visiting strange beds with insufficient or just plain different pillows and I’ve had my fill. It’s not been good for the SPD at night although thank heavens it’s eased off during the day and after four whole nights in my own bed, it’s been much better the last couple of nights, too.

I crave a whole weekend at home. Was off to a 40th birthday this weekend, the last of the once in a life time, I’ve got to do these things standing between me and calm before baby. Then it was a case of 3 blessed weeks without having to go anywhere to order the last bunch of stuff, plan, sort the nursery, pack up my office and generally sort everything out. No nights away looming, no going anywhere, just Mr BC and me in our little pod.

I’ve been looking forward to it.

So what happens? Yep, Mum in-Law - who lives six hours away - has fallen and broken her leg. It’s pretty grim, she’ll be in hospital for a week so we’ve binned the 40th birthday in favour of whizzing down to Wales for a few days to help her settle in when she comes out. That’s more working days away though (slightly panicky timbre in BC’s voice here). We’d have to be a special kind of shitty to even think of not going, though. They are lovely and they genuinely need our help.

It’s a 6 hour drive though.

6 hours. That’s a lot of pee breaks.

We’re going on Saturday after my first anti-natal class. Tuesday we come home. Mr BC has meetings the length and breadth of the country. If we can find a station, he’ll drop me off and I’ll get a train to Birmingham where I can go shopping - now there’s a thought - and as the last one is there, he can pick me up on his way back, seeing as that’s where he’ll end up. That would be good and if I can find a commodious bed shop possibly even restful…

We’ll have to go back to Wales again though. I think possibly in week 38 which is getting really, uncomfortably close to the wire… Doubts surround the straight 7 working days then… still the day shopping in Brum might sort that.

Poor Mum (in-law), it’s not her fault and at least it’s happened now between the chronic SPD and actual scheduled poppage so in theory I might actually be able to be of some practicable use to them! In fact, if Muffin arrives when due - which I did - then she’ll be up and about and on the mend by that time and we can rest easy in our own chaotic time knowing she and Dad are ok.

On the up side. Since it’s happened to my own Dad, before, at least I can reassure them and think of things that might be useful to take down there, a non slip bathmat, a plastic patio chair for the shower (with wet exes round the legs so they don’t scratch the bath). Some books for her to read or maybe some puzzle books, crosswords and stuff like that for her to do.

It’s a bit of a worry though and people keep telling me I need to take it easy and relax. In fact if I hear that one more time I’m going to do somebody an injury!

Sometimes, duty calls. They need our help. It’s just a bit of a worry they need us now… especially as I’m sure it’s breech, I have a number of minor but significant if ignored complications and I’ve heard things about the Welsh NHS that would make your blood curdle…

On the unrelated up side. We got a major purchase out of the way yesterday. We had identified a pushchair/travel system we wanted but it was £500! I kid you not! However, I found a second hand one which had only been used for about 7 months on Ebay. Usually on Ebay the second hand ones go for about £450 - hardly worth it. However, if you can find a pick up only one, they usually go for less, in this case for £200.

It belonged to somebody just down the road from my parents - who turned out to know them. Ok so if I lived near the Wirrel I’d have got one for less BUT my Mum and Dad, who were intent on buying us a pushchair, took delivery and paid for it, bless em! I’m so pleased to have got it for £200 - it’s still too much but at least I’ve saved them a bit of cash as they were intent on buying it for us new!

The woman dropped it off last night - so although I have to go schlepping down there to collect it I’ve successfully given them scope to feel indulgent and generous without costing them too much (wish I could have got it for £150 though, I hate my parents spending that much money).

The £500 price for a new one covers a car seat as well but the girl told my Mum that I should forget that and buy the bog standard mothercare one which fits. Which car seat have I managed to blag, free?

Drum roll… wait for it…

Yes! The bog standard mothercare one. So potentially, they’ve scored us the whole £500 system for £200!

Result!

So things are ok, if a little more hectic than I need or want them to be - more hectic than they are when I’m not pregnant and going at life like a bull in a china shop, frankly. Never mind, when the baby comes. It will feel like fucking peace at last after all this!

Oh yes. Everything has an up side if you look for it.

I am enjoying three blissful days with no appointments, no social stuff, nothing. It’s been blissful becasue I’ve finally have some time to get my head round what I’ve done… and er what needs to be done to ameliorate the impact. What needs packed, what needs unpacked, what’s still to buy… etc.

Just been discussing a party I’m going to with a friend - her 40th. It’s the second 40th this year - it’s all go!

There’s a cabbal of 4 of us who were really close at school and one had her’s last year on her 39th and her husband’s 40th and since the Muffin will be arriving on or around my 40th birthday I’ve decided I will have to have mine later. Friend thought this was great as it would spread them out. I do too, dancing and pregnancy are not a match made in heaven.

We were chuckling about how Mr BC and I would have to have a 42, Meaning of Life and 50 for Mr BC Science Fiction party or, if I have produced another sprog in two years time, it will have to wait until I’m 44 and then we’ll have an Almost The Meaning of Life (52) For Mr BC and 40th Birthday that I’ve been Meaning to Have for Years but Couldn’t Because I Kept Having Children at Bloody Inconvenient Times Science Fiction Party.

Snappy titles huh?

She reckons she’d go as Wharf and I reckoned I’d go as Darth Vader. No looking pretty as Princess Leia or Uhuru for us. She’s got an excuse, though, she’s gay! I’m just a spanner!

Lots of contact about my art, too - links with craft fairs and other artists, all people contacting me, all useful… bread on the waters if you like.

I have 8 to 10 weeks to ready the house, let alone myself, for motherhood. Yikes. Will I get everything sorted in time?

Million dollar question! You know me though, don’t you so I think we can all answer it with a certain amount of confidence? Not in a million years, mate but it’ll be fine.

I spent some time in my studio today and packed up two boxes of my precious toys. Only about another 30 or so and I’ll have them all sorted. I really enjoyed doing that, it was great to look at them all again.

Many are new and still boxed, although I much prefer it when I’m able to get them unboxed as they’re more fun then. On the up side, if they’re all boxed at least the process doesn’t get held up when I keep stopping to play. Trying to stick to themes and packing all the boxed ones first so we now have three boxes of Dr Whos stuff packed with a few extra overflow items which fitted better in the holes left between the packed boxes. Only supermarionation, StarTrek, StarWars, JamesBond and “sundries” to go then!

Despite their being boxed boxes, so to speak, each one contains one or two loose figures so that there is somebody to let the others out when they all come alive at night.

This is the way I think. Welcome to my world.

I also managed to sort out my old computer so I can put it on Freecycle. Oh how much easier it would have been if I could have just done “format C” but nobody would want a 1998 computer without a little bit of a carrot. I’m hoping the aged versions of Macromedia Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Pagemaker it contains will appeal, despite their age.

I guess there might be some poor cash strapped student somewhere who would appreciate it with an external drive for extra storage.

On the pregnancy front, the SPD is still there, still painful and still annoying but a lot better. I have grown out of one of my last two pairs of trousers though. Just call me 101. Not so great. I have one more pair but they are cotton three quarter length - there’s me thinking they’d be useful if there was any warm weather. There hasn’t been.

Anyhow, I am now down to a pair of purple chords and a huge orange skirt which presents similar difficulties to the trousers - ie not tenable without thermal underwear! Mwa ha ha haargh!

Never mind, deciding what to wear has never been easier.

I do find myself wishing more and more that I could have just laid a giant egg, like a crocodile, left it on the spare room bed and then come back 9 months later to be around when it hatched. Although with Mr Cat in the house I’d have had to watch out for preditors.

We’re pretty near tooled up though, I just need to get a straight run when I’m here long enough to order the rest of the stuff I need off the internet and able to be confident I’ll be in the country when it arrives. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on in April but it’s going to be a struggle. I have contented myself with working out exactly what I want, where from and writing lists… with links to the pages where I can find everything.

Spudorama!

Right, better go make supper.

A meh day.

Ragged.

Last week, well on Sunday and Monday, the Muffin turned. No longer was he lying diagonally across me, with all his weight on the dodgy bit of pelvis he was upside down, the correct way and pain-wise, all was peachy. Hell on Monday I even cut the hedge…

Tuesday… the great conundrum… shall I go swimming or borrow my friend’s hot tub for an hour or two? Seeing as I feel so goddamn good, I’ll swim.

Noooo! That’s the wrong answer! Stupid, stupid, STUPID!

I go swimming, it’s lanes. There are two. Fast and slow. It’s a lie. They are splashy crawl and breast stroke. There is NO difference in speed. Both are fast.

Damn.

I get in and do 15 lengths of backstroke. I have to go faster than I want to because it’s very full and I am holding people up if I don’t keep pace - a pace I’d usually have no trouble with, I might add.

When I get out, I learn two things.

1. SPD and kicking. Absolute no-no! Whatever they say, breast stroke legs probably would be better.

2. At some point in the proceedings, the Muffin has retreated to the bottom again.

3. I can hardly walk to the changing rooms.

Nooooooooooo!

Night comes, pain comes, sleep - or at least deep sleep - doesn’t. I wake up feeling like shit and as if I haven’t slept.

Never mind. I have cheered myself up no end by having a haircut. For the next 24 hours or so I will look like a smart well turned out female. That’s good as for the most part I feel like there are actually three sexes, man, woman and pregnant. It’s great to feel womanly again.

This afternoon… not so great. I had a doctor’s appointment but the SPD smarting a tad I decided to eschew the bike and take my car. I jemmy myself into it, turn the key and what happens. Short of a sad metallic sigh, nothing. The battery is flat. It picks now, for the first time in about three years to die on me.

Arse.

I get out, lock it, admonish it for being a little bleeder and go get my bike. Luckily there is still time. I flee up the hill, or at least, creep up using the granny ring, all the while wheezing like an asthmatic pensioner with a 50 a day high tar fag habit. Just get there on time. Ask the doctor all my questions. She reassures me about the scary ones but there is no easy answer to the SPD. I will be in pain… for the next 9 weeks at least and for anything up to 6 months after the birth possibly ever, depending on whether it knits back right or wrong… oooh a post partum visit to the chiropractor essential I think..

She confirms my suspicions about the Muffin’s unusual diagonal position. Head on the left at the bottom, feet kind of half way up on the right. Unfortunately, the fact he tried two days upright and slipped back after the swimming is most likely to be less to do with the backstroke and more to do with his being comfy like that and therefore, disinclined to move to a less pain-inducing position.

Bugger.

Sometimes, even when life is great, it kind of sucks!

Yes.

Well, at least you won’t have to guess what this post is about. Not too much anyway. It’s about organisation or the fact that achieving a smooth running life actually appears to bear no relation whatsoever to the amount of effort you put into organising it.

I used to watch a comedy TV show called Red Dwarf which is set four million years into the future. One episode is all about luck. The the heroes discover that luck is actually a virus and come across a phial of the stuff.

Yeh, well I reckon organisational skills are kind of similar. Mine only work when I’m planning what I need to do and ordering other people to do the nitty gritty - ie in a job - the minute I personally get involved the wheels fall off big time.

Let me explain…

Once again, I have become an unwitting victim to the pointless tweaking of reality to make life just that little bit more complicated for the rest of us - especially those of us plagued by the bloody chaos fairies the way I am - by the organised tidy bastards. In this case the ones who dick with the clocks, solely, I am certain, to punish disorganised people like me for not being automata such as they.

Why is being organised such a big deal? Why is it in this day and age of equality for all that being organised is considered the holy grail of personal traits ahead of everything else. I don’t punish these anally retentive smeg ends for having OCD and an imagination bypass so what have they got against people like me?

Ok, I’m not organised - I try to be, you know, the way Canute tried to stop the tide - but I’m fighting a losing battle. When I do try to organise my life, you’d be amazed at the lengths I go to to ensure everything runs smoothly and you’d be even more amazed at how consistently I still manage to lurch spectacularly from one crisis to another in a state of perpetual chaos…

Except at work where, by din’t of planning what needs to be done, when and by not actually tainting the process by being directly involved, I was known for my ruthless efficiency.

Sighs…

As you know, I’m pregnant. I am also vague. That doesn’t mean I lack self discipline, it doesn’t mean I can’t - or don’t try to - organise myself, it just means it’s a lot harder for me than it is for any of you. That doesn’t make me dumber or less worthy than anyone else it just makes me different.

So. Every year here in Britain they fuck with the clocks. Twice. First they put them forward in spring, so we get more daylight, then they put them back in winter so it gets dark an hour later. Whatever they say, nobody actually knows why. The official reason given each year is that it’s done so that the kids get to be outside in daylight on their way to school in winter.

Sorry but that’s cock and bull for a start.

It might have been true once but not in my lifetime, not when you have to be in your classroom for registration at 8.30 am and they don’t release you until 4.00 pm.

In the depths of winter here in Blighty, even in the South, it gets light at about half past eight and dark at four so when you’re going to school in deepest, darkest winter you actually do both journeys in twilight and see no daylight, outside break times, at all. So that explodes that theory then.

Trust me, I went to school for 13 years. I know.

On Saturday night, the clocks went back so all of a sudden on Sunday morning, when I woke up, the time that had been 8 am yesterday was 9 am today.

That meant it was time to go round house, checking each and every single piece of electrical equipment, either to move the clock onwards an hour or to press the button to confirm that yes, I notice it has gone forward automatically and yes, I would like to keep it that way.

The most important thing, of course, was my Compaq iPAQ.

This is the machine by which I live and die. I know my limitations, especially at the moment. I’m far too vague to actually remember when and where the legion of health professionals watching over my pregnancy have arranged to see me and that’s why I have an iPAQ to do it for me. I set it to beep at me before each appointment in good time.

Good time being however long I will need to get ready and get to wherever I have to go with whatever equipment, samples etc they require and not be late.

Having turned on the iPAQ on Sunday morning and clicked “yes” on the “all the clocks have changed do you want me to go forward an hour?” button I went to bed on Sunday confident that anything I had scheduled for Monday would not be missed.

Conscious that I had a doctor’s appointment which I’d cancelled and rearranged 3 times, I checked the time and date of that before turning the light out. Wednesday. Good. I relaxed into my cosy covers and slipped gratefully into the land of nod.

Spool forwards to Monday morning and you can imagine how delighted I am when at 10 am, while I am happily hoovering the hall in my pyjamas, the beeper goes on my iPAQ to tell me I have a physiotherapy appointment at 9.30.

Shit!

It would be physio, these appointments are like fricking unicorn poop.

I check the clock on the iPAQ and sure enough it says 10.00. Even the sodding diary knows it’s 10 but the fricking beeper attached to the diary, the beeper I’m relying on, is still running on Grenwich Bloody Mean Fricking Bastard Time.

Yes. It thinks it’s giving me an ample half hour warning to cycle a couple of miles to my local hospital and not miss my appointment… half an hour ago.

Arse.

I ring. Yes. I’ve missed it. I get the next available appointment. 23rd April. Yes that’s right, 3 week’s time.

Balls.

So I’d lay bets a lot of you are more organised then me and your lives run more smoothly BUT. Do you go to the lengths of chaos management I do? I’d bet you don’t. Surely, setting alarms to beep when you have to, get up, again when you have to get ready, when you have to leave and then, finally when you are meant to be somewhere has got to be approaching the outer limits of tidy personesque OCD.

It probably goes beyond… yeh, I’ll bet the most unimaginative anally retentive Bauhaus furnished flat dwelling robotoid doesn’t even do that.

But I’ll also bet, if they do, that the sodding things don’t malfunction like some thousand year old droid with silicone brain rot. And if they do, when they tell other people their plight is met with sympathy and deemed by all to be a very unlucky fault in the machine not, as with me, regarded as a fault in the owner (and greeted with a lecture about being more organised and not checking the machine properly or doing a soft reboot etc etc).

In short. It WORKS for them… and not for me.

Why?

Because they have the virus and I don’t. It’s the only logical reason.

…Bastards!