New 'do

Well, I had this great haircut--the one in the photos on my website and in my profile here--but sadly it proved too complicated for someone as un-hair-savvy as myself. Plus thanks to the fact that my hair has been growing like crazy thanks to prenatal vitamins, I was having perpetual bad hair days. So yesterday I went under the scissors and chopped it off--the longest bit is now just at my chin, and pretty much all the layers are gone.

Changing my hair has always been one of my favorite ways to break up the relative monotony of my life. From haircuts to dyeing, I've never been shy when it comes to my hair. It's been past my shoulders and less than three inches long, stick straight and permed, burgandy and blond streaked and shoe polish black. And every once in a while it's the dull dark brown with a slight wave that I was born with.

But one of the many compromises of marriage has manifested itself in the way I fashion my hair. Now there's someone that I want to please and whose opinion I value. And frankly, he's got to look at me a lot more often than I do. So I can't just make a spur-of-the-moment appointment at the salon to have it all chopped off, can't swing by Target on the way home from wherever and pick up a bottle of Natural Instincts Spiced Tea temporary color. It's a small compromise, but a compromise nonetheless, and sometimes it chafes. But compared to the payoff of marriage, it's something I deal with.

And now, with Baby M on the way, I've been thinking about how weird it might be for my kid(s) to come home from school one day and see Mommy with red hair, or permed hair, or hardly any hair at all--all within one school year. And when my five-year-old emerges from her bedroom with scissors in her hand and a whole new 'do of her own, would I really be able to blame her? How about when my eight-year-old wants to dye his hair blue?

So the hair is short, and straight, and brown.

For now. :)

Earthquake!

Well, I am officially a Californian--I felt my first earthquake! It was a 5.3, located out in the desert, but felt all the way down in San Diego. There have been about 3 in the past week--there was one back on Sunday while we were rehearsing before the service, but we didn't feel it on the stage (the sound guy at the back of the auditorium did, though), and there was another one the other day that we didn't feel; it was up in northern California, but a 7.0, which is big. (Fun fact: the intensity of the earthquake increases TEN FOLD with every whole point on the richter scale. So a 6.0 quake is ten times stronger than a 5.0.) But this one--holy cow! I SAW the house move! The ceiling fan shook, the blinds in the windows moved--I was kneeling on the floor and it make me sway! It lasted about 5 seconds. And what's really disorienting is that there's this sound that comes with it that sounds like a big gust of wind, so I'm sitting here thinking, "Is it wind that's doing this?"

Dan's just rolling his eyes at me. We're sitting there watching TV and he says, completely nonchalant, "Oh, earthquake." I, on the other hand, have my eyes nearly falling out of my face and my jaw on the floor, going nuts. Dan points to me and says, "Hm. Chicago--" points to himself--"California." Okay, yes, being completely unfamiliar with these events, I will admit I probably overreacted a bit. But come on! It's so cool! I'm sure I wouldn't have thought it was cool if things had broken, but whatever. Anyway, I feel baptised into the culture. Dan's just annoyed that they've taken off the U.S. Open to broadcast the news, which really just consists of visuals of the seismograph and taking calls from residents all over the area and saying the same info over and over.

I love lists!

Apparently the UK likes them, too--this is the second list of this kind that I've seen. The year I lived in Glasgow (1996-97) one of their bookstore chains came out with the same type of list, in conjunction with the BBC. I used that list the year I was there to fill some of my dead time (which I had a lot of since I was only taking 3 classes), and now I get to do it again! Here's the brand new list of the UK's Best-Loved Books (I believe they're voted on by the general public). I've got 42 of them covered (in bold--thanks to all those English classes in high school and college!)--how many have you read already.

The U.K.'s Best-Loved Novels

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Circle of Life

This whole pregnancy thing has made me pretty noastlgic and contemplative lately. One of the things that has been on my mind a lot is my Grandmother Strobel, whom we called "Meama." (Kyle's pronounciation of "grandma" when he was little.) Meama died right before New Year's Eve, 2003 from liver cancer. She had other great-grandkids, so it's not like she didn't get a chance to see any of them, but she won't get the chance to see mine, and I'm finding that really sucks.

Dan got to see Meama twice before she died. Our whole family went out to Chicago that May to see her, which was the first time Dan met her, and then again that October, when we brought her photos of the wedding since she couldn't be there. But I'm mad now that they won't get the chance to enjoy their mutual obsession together: golf.

Until I married Dan, I thought Meama was nuts to tape golf tournaments when she wouldn't be home to watch them live. I couldn't imagine sitting there watching hour after hour of a little white ball hopping around the monotonous stretches of green. Now I watch with Dan all the time and I totally get it, but I can't appreciate it the way he does, because I can't play worth a darn. Meama, on the other hand, was club champion many times over, an avid golfer whose entire social life centered around her country club friends and foursomes. She would have been so happy to have a golf watching friend like Dan. She would have taken him out to the club and showed him off to her friends--she had no problem with bragging about her family to anyone who would listen--and together they would have discussed green speeds, yardage, swing styles, their favorite clubs. I would have been bored out of my mind, but they would have been in their element.

Death just sucks, you know? We say it's natural, part of the circle of life, but really it isn't. We weren't meant to die, remember? Death came from the fall, it wasn't part of the original blueprint, and I think there's still a thread in us that remembers this and knows that it is not natural, that this isn't the way it was originally supposed to be. It's just wrong.

So now I have to settle for memories, and my baby has to settle for second-hand stories. Not fair.

New blog!

Well, I promised myself I wasn't going to let my blog become a pregnancy blog, but it looks like I'm failing at that, so I decided to start a new blog for all my baby stuff. I've moved the baby-related blogs from this journal to that one, and promise to keep this one strictly writer related!

(Hm...can't get the link to work for some reason...it's gobabymorrow.blogspot.com.)

LOST: one brain

LOST: one brain, medium-sized, grayish-pink, wrinkled. Right hemisphere slightly more developed. Believed to have been lost back in April when I got pregnant. Contained important information, like where my favorite brown sweater is, how to spell words I normally could spell in my sleep, and most of my friends' birthdays and last names. If found, please return immediately.