40 weeks, no baby yet

So here I am, a day past my due date and wondering when this baby will actually turn up. It's funny - I have been saying for some time that I'm in no hurry for the baby to arrive; I want him to stay in there as long as he needs to, because although I want to meet him, I know life will never be the same again. And I've always thought he would be late, because the official date of conception seemed a bit early to us, and then the due date got moved up by 10 days after the first ultrasound (which would mean this is really only week 38 and a bit).

But... now I'm starting to worry slightly about whether labour really will start to happen naturally. I've no reason to think it won't, but I don't feel any different from a couple of weeks ago. On the other hand, the baby's head is now engaged, according to the midwife, so he's going in the right direction.

Then again, maybe it's just that it's hard to imagine giving birth when you've never done it. Mum says this is normal. I had a hard time believing I could get pregnant, if I'm honest. So I suppose labour will just start when it starts, and then we just have to see how it goes.

We are now officially Ready. We have clothes, we have nappies (disposable for the first few days, then cloth - pre-folds, should anyone be interested), we have a moses basket and a Moby sling. I have made and frozen lasagne and spiced savoury lentil cakes and stocked the freezer and the larder. The baby's room is ready and tidy. I still need to finish my baby quilt and blanket, but I'm working on those.

The baby is not quiltless, however, because one of Mum's blogfriends, Dianne, gave us this beautiful quilt, and a shawl and hat too:



Totally unexpected, but very much appreciated - the quilt is now beautifying the baby's cot, which he won't actually be using for a while yet.

So the baby can come any time. I wonder how we'll feel once things start moving? J is a bit nervous; I'm more apprehensive about needing labour interventions than about the natural course of events. But we can't tell how things will play out, so we're just trying to stay calm.

Some people in this house have no trouble staying calm at all.


Right. It is tea-time. I have no idea what we're having for dinner. (I think the aunt-to-be would suggest curry followed by pineapple... she's quite eager for her nephew to arrive.)

Seriously overdue post

OK. I have been terrible at posting this last few months. For what it's worth, I've been a bit preoccupied...

J and I are having a baby.

You probably know this if you read my mum's blog. I have been finding it a bit tricky to write about, though. Which is why we are through the first trimester and halfway into the second before I've managed to do it.

We decided at the end of last summer that we were ready (if anyone is ever ready) to start a family, and then... decision made, in theory, we didn't start trying until the end of September. I had sort of assumed that we would need to try for a bit before we would conceive - perhaps because most of the stories one hears on blogs are about people having trouble - but we were lucky. I got a positive test at the end of October, just as we were about to drive down to see J's parents, which was a little strange for us as we'd decided not to tell anyone until the 12-week mark.

At that point, I was very tired, and having slight difficulty explaining why I was so tired. My father-in-law spotted this and I was convinced he was on to the reason why (but he says he wasn't!)

Luckily for me, I didn't have any morning sickness to speak of - I felt slightly off-colour and went off some foods I normally like, but that was all. For this reason I had a lot of difficulty convincing myself that everything was going OK. I don't know whether it was hormones, or what, but I stressed out a lot over whether the baby was healthy and what we would do if it wasn't.

The 12-week scan came as a great relief - the baby was actually there, moving, with a heartbeat! And arms and legs and things!



When this was on the screen, it was a moving image, and you could see the baby sucking its thumb.

That was the 28th of December. Yup, more than a month ago. Since then, things have gone remarkably smoothly. The occasional nausea went away, and I haven't yet put any weight on. I went back to see the doctor last week and all seems to be going well.

J and I are beginning to feel able to talk about this as if it is definitely going to happen. It still feels a little bit like tempting fate, but on the whole I have calmed down a lot. I thought I would get all stressed out again when the time came to take the triple test (for Down's, spina bifida and Edwards' syndrome) but I've managed to stay fairly calm; two weeks to wait for the results.

At the moment, we are 17 weeks along, and the baby is due in early July. We have plenty of time to get things ready before July... right?

The guinea pigs are all fine.

Happy November

So the last anybody heard from me, I was in America, having fun at WisCon. Which I did. I don't have many photographs of the actual con - too busy having fun - but Madison looks like this:



While I was there I tried the local delicacy (tastes nicer than it looks), had my hair plaited up like this, met up with Mum and Dad's old friends J and B and their grownup children (who were lovely) and my internet friend Cabell, among others, and had many, many conversations about Doctor Who and Lois McMaster Bujold books. I did a lot of live-tweeting of panels and felt, for once, as if I was at the cutting edge. I also managed to win a book token and come home with all of these.

And then I came home and was reunited with J and my piggies.



In August I went to the Edinburgh Ravelry meetup and rubbed shoulders with lots of famous-to-me knitters, and some genuinely famous ones. I have been knitting lots of shawls, and a few socks.

Then in September, I went with my lovely in-laws on what has become our traditional British holiday. We were based in Bamburgh in the north of England, where we went for walks and I took lots of wannabe-arty photos.

We also went to Lindisfarne:


and to the Alnwick Garden, which I really liked.



A good time was had in general.


When I haven't been on holiday, much of my life has been spent at work. For various complicated reasons, work has been very busy this summer and rather more time-consuming than normal. I have been finding that I haven't had a lot of brain left to blog with, hence the silence. I am thinking about what I can do about this.

In the meantime I have mustered enough braincells to make a boyfriend for our sock monkey:


to knit some ghosts:


and to make a pumpkin lantern for Hallowe'en.


So maybe I'm back. Hello.

Zoom

I’m sitting typing this on my laptop in the departure lounge of Edinburgh airport, about to go on a holiday I haven’t told you about because frankly, I had difficulty believing it was really going to happen. This has been a very busy month, one way or another, not least because of the last-minute nature of this trip.

I’m going to WisCon, which is a speculative fiction convention with a feminist slant in Madison in the USA. I have various Livejournal friends who have been to the con on a regular basis, and I was hoping to go last year, but I was involved in a project at work which clashed with it. However, this year I am really going. I’ve never been to a con before, but as they go, this one is meant to be small(ish) and friendly.

Anyway I can just about count on having enjoyable conversations about the minutiae of books that I like but which the general public have probably not heard of. Once you get me started, I can talk about books for hours, but unless the other person is at least interested in the same genre, it quickly becomes self-indulgent.
J and I have several interests in common – music, visual arts, languages – but our taste in books, film and TV doesn’t overlap all that much. J has nobly read various books by Neil Gaiman, and even came to see him read once, but otherwise he maintains a fairly strict “no spaceships, no pointy ears” policy. He prefers comedy to drama and non-fiction to fiction, and I go the other way. My family are all readers, but are not particularly drawn to fantasy or SF – the word “piffle” has occasionally been bandied about. This is fine. There are genres in which I have no interest (straight romance, the kind of crime novel that has lots of information about different types of ammunition, horror). But it will be nice to meet some people in real life who know what an ansible is or how to get a dragon to do what you want (it seems you need his true name, and nerves of steel...)

It will also be lovely finally to meet the LJ friends in real life. As it happens, some old friends of my parents live in Madison (total coincidence) and I’ll be meeting up with them too.

This month has been a bit of a rollercoaster of stress, followed by relief, followed by stress. One of our guinea pigs is still not completely better, which has been taking a lot out of both of us (although she seems to be responding to treatment). And it is such a long time since I have been away that I’m totally out of practice (also, last time there wasn’t a volcano). I think next time I go abroad I’ll go somewhere within the EU – much easier!

Turmoil

April has been a pretty rough month. I have been putting off posting until things evened out a bit, because I don't like to write a big dollop of self-pity - especially when so many other people are going through trying times as well...

At the start of April, J's grandfather died. He had been unwell a few times recently, but had only just been told that he couldn't go on living alone because of his Parkinson's. He'd agreed to this, then took ill, was taken to hospital and died a couple of days afterwards.

So the news wasn't totally unexpected, but we hadn't realised he was as ill as that (I'm not sure if anyone did). We have been bearing in mind that this was a reasonably merciful way to go - Gramps really didn't want to move out of his house, and in the event he didn't have to, and he wasn't confused or demented and he didn't linger on suffering. But it's still sad.

We went down for the funeral and spent some time with J's family, who are, as ever, lovely.

That was the first week of April. About a week after we got back, we noticed that Pumpkin, one of our guinea pigs, was making a noise and looking uncomfortable when urinating. J had noticed this a few weeks earlier, but I hadn't been able to catch her in the act and was rather inclined to put it down to his OCD - he does get very worried about things, often without much cause.

However, we could now clearly see that Pumpkin was in pain, and thought it was likely to be bladder stones, which are common in guinea pigs. They're caused by a diet too high in calcium, which some guinea pigs have difficulty excreting (it's genetically linked). The stones can be fatal - two friends of mine have recently lost guinea pigs to them. We took Pumpkin to the vet, who thought this was a likely diagnosis and admitted her for ultrasound scanning to confirm it, then possibly surgery to remove the stones. Pumpkin is a little tiny thing, so we were quite upset at this prospect; but the alternative would be putting her down, which we couldn't bring ourselves to face.

We returned home. That evening, Brownie started showing the same symptoms as Pumpkin.

So we took her to the vet too, and spent the rest of the evening wondering if we were going to be down to a single pig, and feeling that it was all our fault for feeding them the wrong things. All this was complicated quite a lot by the fact that we don't have a car and were obliged to rely on Mum for lifts to the vet - which she nobly provided. In the midst of this, my great-aunt fell and broke her hip and was hospitalised, and my grandmother hasn't been too well, which put yet more pressure on poor Mum.

As it happened, Pumpkin did have stones, but they were relatively small and she passed them on her own before she was due to have surgery - when she was scanned again, they'd gone. Brownie didn't appear to have stones, but she had calcium buildup which is a precursor, and she had it flushed out (as did Pumpkin). Both of them came home a week ago, and although Pumpkin has been a bit subdued, she's beginning to perk up. Brownie seems to be completely recovered.

All this was very stressful. We love our animals, but hadn't previously come up against the moral dilemmas of having a seriously ill pet. A lot of people would find it silly to go to so much trouble over a little rodent, and I can hardly blame them - but I don't think we could have decided not to.

This week has mostly been taken up with squirting antibiotics and vitamins into the pigs' tiny little mouths, letting them lick slimy drippy invalid food off my fingers, and making sure our well pig didn't chase the others and make them panic. Training for parenthood, maybe?

Things are starting to calm down now. The pigs seem to be recovering on course (the vet said it may take them six weeks to return to normal, but they improve every day). My aunt has had her hip pinned together and seems to be doing OK.

I think we might take a while to recover completely, though.

Green shoots

If you squint, you could convince yourself it's spring. The sun has been shining (some of the time, anyway); bulbs are poking up in the garden; it hasn't been as cold (except on the days when it has).

The onset of possible spring is making me think about plans for the future: short-term ones like knitting projects, and more life-changing ones like moving house and the Baby Question. Only I need to get the Thesis done before I can really think about any of these. I think I maybe need to take some time off work and grind away at it - I have two days a week to do it in, but somehow I never manage to get as much done as I think I am going to.

Not a lot else is happening here at the moment. We went out to lunch with my parents and Granny for Mothers' Day, which was lovely. We'd really celebrated it the week before (since my sister and brother were both away for the actual day) but can you celebrate mothers too thoroughly? Of course not.



J's big news this week is that he has bought a digital satellite receiver. He speaks German fluently and is fond of watching German free-to-air TV, but has hitherto been doing this through an elderly Sky box without a card, which isn't ideal. This new box is very clever, and among other things will receive signals from two different satellites without getting confused, so he can watch either UK television or German through the same box.

This means, of course, that he will need two dishes, one to point at each satellite. He has one in our back garden at the moment (see above) but I happen to know there's another one squirreled away under the stairs. Maybe our (hypothetical) new house needs a bigger back garden.

The other snag is that the new box needs an update to its software before it will receive German HD channels, and he is a bit anxious about installing this. Fingers crossed. (This all seems like quite a lot of trouble to go to to watch *The Simpsons* dubbed into German...)

I received a request a little while ago for a combined picture of my sock monkey with a guinea pig. Here you go, Loth's Second Born - will this do?



J has decided that the monkey's name is "Mrs Monkey". I will shortly be making a Mr Monkey to keep her company, so I expect more sock monkey photographs will be forthcoming.

In other news, I only have one week left of yoga. According to the yoga teacher, I am the only person who's been every week. Unfortunately I still can't do the Half Vinyasa. Perhaps I need more practice...

February's ice and sleet

You know what? I have had about enough of it being February. March can start any time it likes. It has been very cold all week and we have had snow and rain alternately, with high winds from time to time. I don't normally mind winter, but I would really welcome even one day of unseasonal mildness with a bit of sunshine now and again.

On the other hand, February does have a few consolations.



J and I celebrated Valentine's day in our usual fashion, with home-made cards for each other. And then he made us dinner and produced some pink fizzy wine, as seen above (it really was pink, although the red candle behind it is making it pinker).

Then on the Tuesday it was Pancake Day and we duly ate pancakes. I've never quite bought the official explanation that we are supposed to eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday so that we can use up any ingredients that are forbidden during Lent; apart from the egg, there's only flour and milk in them, which doesn't sound terribly indulgent even by the standards of more austere times. Although I'm pretty sure that lemons, maple syrup and large lumps of vanilla ice cream would count as luxuries. (We did not put all these on the same pancake.)

My spare time lately has been taken up with a bit of knitting for the Ravelympics. This is an event on the knitting/crochet social network, Ravelry, and the idea is that during the course of the Olympics you take on a knitting challenge. I decided I was going to learn entrelac, which is a technique that produces knitting that looks like it's woven over and under itself.

Since I was just starting out with this I chose to knit Quant, a headband.



Entrelac turns out to be much less complicated than it looks. The blocks of knitting are attached to each other at right angles; you start one by picking up stitches along the side of a previous block. Then you join it to the one at the side by knitting two stitches together at the end of each row. (There, that made no sense to anyone who doesn't already know how to knit. Sorry.)

I'm very pleased with the finished headband - it should get plenty of wear, since I have another knitted headband that I use a lot. If I wear my hair up, I can't wear a woolly hat, so this lets me have tidy hair and warm ears.


Or it will if I can persuade Pumpkin to give it back.

2010

Despite the fact that I was quite happy saying "nineteen-whatever" for the first twenty years of my existence, I am having trouble thinking that this year is "twenty-ten". I'm sticking with "two thousand'n ten" for now, although I hear that most people seem to be quite happy saying "the twenty-twelve Olympics".

I'm hoping that this decade will have a good last year. I will finish my thesis. Maybe we will move house (though I'm sticking with "maybe").

Just now, our own house seems quite big and commodious since the Christmas tree went back in the loft. We have to move the sofa to accommodate it, so we lose a bit of floor in the living room; strange how much difference it makes.

During December, the guinea pigs' living space underwent some renovations:



They're now on a fleece blanket (over newspaper) instead of wood shavings. The wood shavings get kicked on to the carpet, and they also create huge amounts of dust, which was annoying for us and possibly not that healthy for the piggies. The room's been much less dusty since we swapped, and the pigs seem to like the fleece.

They also now have a play-pen in the spare room (which folds away when we need the room), which is what we were making in my last post. I tried to get some pictures and video of them trotting about in it, without much success yet - it's been too dark.



We have not been as badly affected by the snow as... well, as most people we know. Our street is very snowy, but it's not on a slope and we don't have a car, so it could be worse. The main roads are clear, the buses haven't stopped running and the supermarket is within walking distance. It could be a lot worse.

The beasties, of course, are not hugely disadvantaged by the snow (though it would come over their ears if they went out in it). They do seem to think it's hibernation season, though:



It seems like the weather for knitting.



No, I haven't gone completely nuts - these are the toes of socks which I'm making for a "travelling knitalong" (the sock gets passed around a group of five people, each of whom knit a section and finally get their original socks back again). Should be fun. They make good guinea pig hats, don't they?

I cast on a non-travelling sock on the bus when I went to meet up with Loth and Mum on Monday. Mum said she was disappointed by my lack of progress a couple of hours later. I dunno - I don't knit particularly fast, and I thought this was quite good for one day's knitting...



This was rather a rambly post, wasn't it?

In other news, my sister and I are signing up to do a yoga class this year, so as to be calm and serene. "And to have thighs the size of pencils" - sister. Wish us luck with that one.

Crisis over?

We now have a theory about why the piggies were nibbled (though not who did it). I mentioned it can be a sign of stress.

Last week we had to remove their little wooden house temporarily on a couple of occasions, because they had got it wet and it had to be cleaned and dried out (guinea pigs don't do well in damp conditions). This definitely freaked them out a bit and they all crammed into the other shelter, which they don't normally sleep in. I wonder if that's when the nibbling happened.

In any case, we have made a trip to the petshop and bought them a new plastic house, which will be readily washable and should give them a safe place to hide even if we have to take their wooden house out again. You're really supposed to provide one hiding-place per pig, and while we had the wooden house, a cardboard tube, and a shelter, we didn't have a spare if any needed to be removed.

No more nibbling has taken place. Fingers crossed.

We also went to IKEA yesterday and bought various household items, including a salad spinner. Apparently my husband has always yearned for one. Known him for eleven years, but he can still surprise me!

So we are not going to worry too much, and going out for Sunday lunch. See you later!

Good news, bad news

J's parents are here, which is lovely. It is J's dad's birthday today, which is also good.

Not so good is that two of our piggies, Brownie and Pumpkin, seem to have nibbled patches in their fur, on their cheeks - which means that they didn't do it themselves. This is known as barbering and it's not a good thing - it can be a sign of stress or aggression, and can be a forerunner of biting. The un-nibbled pig is Cupcake, who is about as aggressive as a cotton-wool ball, as far as we can tell.

So maybe Brownie and Pumpkin are doing it to each other? But it seems very odd that the patches would be in exactly the same place, which they are. We've never seen any of them behaving aggressively, so it's hard to tell.

I have posted for advice on a guinea pig forum and am awaiting developments. We do tend to worry about our piggies' health far more than we probably need to; but then they can't talk, so they can't tell us if something's wrong.

Whatever is wrong, it's not life-threatening and we can take them to the vet next week if we need to. Think about something positive.

It's six weeks until Christmas! I feel fairly positive about this; I like Christmas. Yesterday I saw that they had started to put up the Winter Wonderland amusements on Princes Street. I've never been on the big wheel, but I like the way it looks.

A red hat

I went back to work and tackled my e-mail backlog, as you do.

Then I came home, and tried on the latest product of my needles, which had been drying out after being blocked (soaked in water and re-shaped).



I like red hats. A significant proportion of all the hats I've ever owned have been red. Maybe it's the result of early exposure to the Amazon pirates.

Anyway, this red hat is particularly fine because the cables get bigger from the crown following the Fibonacci sequence. I don't suppose Captain Nancy would have been terribly impressed with that, but I like it.



Brownie's not that impressed, either.

Nothingy kind of day

So most people seem to much prefer either summer or winter?

I don't feel as strongly about it as I used to - when I was a teenager I actively disliked summer. Partly, I suspect, because I didn't like wearing summer clothes because the choice seemed to be between "revealing" and "frumpy" and because I felt hot and pink and undignified.

These days I'm not quite so self-conscious, and also I garden, so I like the period when everything's blooming or fruiting. And I like the light. Not good at waking up when it's dark. But I do like cooler weather, in general - maybe I have a tendency to hibernate.

Today was a nothingy kind of day in which I typed up stuff for the Dreaded Thesis, interspersed with brief bouts of messing around on Ravelry. Sorry. Some days are like that. I did cuddle my little furry friends several times, and fed them grapes.



Do not get between a guinea pig and her grape.

I go back to work tomorrow after my two-week-plus absence with the Virus. That'll come as a shock to the system...

More about knitting and guinea pigs

This is great. The way this is going, I can spend the entire month just answering the comments... well, maybe not. But the snag about starting this in a week when I was recovering from being ill is that I haven't done very much other than knit.

Answers!

Anna wants to know if guinea pigs go to sleep on you (presumably while you're knitting) or move about.

Guinea pigs are weird animals - most of them don't sleep very much at all. They alternate between twenty minutes of moving about and twenty minutes of sitting still - but looking perfectly alert - all day and all night. How they get by on so little sleep is a mystery as yet unsolved by science. It's thought that they take micro-naps but never sleep deeply at all.

I've known some guinea pigs for years without ever seeing them close their eyes. We do see Pumpkin and Cupcake catnapping, but Brownie is pretty much always alert. Cupcake is the sleepiest pig I've ever known, but even she has only gone to sleep outside her cage once (when she was a baby).

They do sit fairly still when they're on our laps, though. A restless pig is usually a pig that needs a toilet break.

Loth, I'm sorry that I can't show them knitting. Can I offer you an intelligent mouse instead?



Meanwhile, I have finished knitting the mitts for my sister. They were a commission rather than a surprise, so I feel I can show you photos without any trouble:





You can see the lacy bit better in the second photo, but I thought I'd better put the first one up just to prove I did knit two! The other knitted thing is a hat, not knitted by me, from which I copied the lace pattern.

What we did at the weekend

I may not have mentioned this before, but my husband has a lively interest in audiovisual and broadcasting technology. Not just the programmes, but the methods of transmission and recording. He also likes to be well-supplied with equipment for receiving and recording transmissions, though he doesn't require it to be new - in fact, he'd rather have something old if he can get it to work. He also likes his hi-fi to sound as good as possible.

As a result, this is what the corner of the sitting room looked like until last Saturday. Lots of boxes and wires.I'm certain that I've mentioned that the TV in the picture above was on the blink. Latterly, it was switching itself off almost immediately after being switched on, which made watching it a bit difficult.

However, the corner of the sitting room now looks like this. Better, isn't it?

(That's an episode of Frasier - the one where a basketball player rubs Niles's head for good luck.)

It took a while to select and buy the TV, partly because we are cautious people when it comes to buying new stuff, and partly because it is impossible to buy new cathode ray TVs any more, and the flat ones seem to sell out very quickly. However, the decision to buy a corner unit was taken and carried out in about 24 hours, mostly because a family trip to IKEA happened to coincide with TV Delivery Day. (If you're reading, Shauna, it's a Leksvik.) I'm so glad we went for it.

Still, you're not interested in our TV. What you really want to know is whether Linds's carrot cake turned out well.

I think this picture speaks for itself. (Goodness, Cupcake looks huge. Maybe she's actually an albino wombat or something.)

Busy busy busy

I have two assignments to hand in on Saturday, so have not had a lot of time to blog. Or a lot of time to do things that are blogworthy. Or to do any Christmas shopping.

There's always time to cuddle the guinea pigs.


On the other hand, I got an early Christmas present yesterday when my Bookbloggers' Christmas Swap parcel arrived from Mariel of Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops. Thank you very much, Mariel!

(You may contend that I am not a bookblogger. However, if you look to your right, there's a link to something called Bibliomane, and I do sometimes blog about books there. I'm hoping to have more time and brain to write proper reviews when I'm finished with all this studying.)

As you can see, my parcel contained a copy of The Gift by Alison Croggon - an Australian writer and poet I haven't heard of before, but the book sounds like my sort of thing.

It also contained these fabulous digital socks.

I have something of a sock addiction which goes beyond a desire to have warm feet. In the winter I particularly like knee socks, which these are (moreover, they're knee socks which stay up). So I'm very pleased with these indeed. They are also so very loud and cheery that I smile every time I look down.

My last day of work is tomorrow, but from then until the weekend, I will be determinedly writing essays about Scottish Local Government. I'll see you on the other side. I can do it, with the help of my new socks -


- and my lovely assistant.

Wet pigs

I've just finished clearing up after the daunting task of giving the guinea pigs a bath. They do not consider this a fun way of spending a Sunday evening. In fact, they usually protest loudly and either cower pitifully in the bath and shudder (Cupcake), try to run away up the sloping end of the bath, giving the illusion of running on a treadmill (Pumpkin) or demonstrate just how high a pig can jump when desperate (Brownie).
But on this occasion they were very good and I'm only lightly scratched. We have to shampoo them periodically to ward off fungal skin infections, which Cupcake and Pumpkin had earlier this year. Otherwise I wouldn't bother - we never washed our previous guinea pigs and they kept themselves perfectly clean, cat-fashion.

They do look nice and fluffy once they've been towelled off and blowdried (on a VERY gentle setting, with the dryer held at a distance!) And Cupcake always looks beautifully white when she's dry, like a washing-powder advert.

I think they've forgiven us. Maybe.

This is my last entry for NaBloPoMo. I did it! I posted every day for 30 days. It may all have been piffle, but it's nice to know I can do it.

I'm going to have some time off work this week - will we see if I can keep this posting up? I suspect I won't, but I think I've proved I do have time to post more often than I did before this month.

Sunny day

It was a beautiful day today, with bright blue skies and golden light. It was pretty chilly, though, and there was still frost in the shade at lunchtime. I went out to buy some groceries, came back into the house and thought "Good, it's lovely and warm in here." Then I noticed that the thermometer in the living room was showing 14° C. The guinea pigs were all piled into their little wooden house in a big furry lump.

Whether the cold had anything to do with it or not, I've been a bit headachy all evening. I used to get them all the time, but it's been a while. It's a bit better now, but nevertheless I am going to have a relaxing bath and go to bed. With a hot water bottle. I think the pigs have the right idea.

We have a working camera

And we like it a lot. We've just spent the past hour taking pictures of our little housemates.

Whether they are overjoyed to be co-opted as photographic models is a bit uncertain, but we're quite pleased with the results, given that we haven't yet memorised all of the manual, and were taking these photos after dark, in rather dim conditions.

We're particularly impressed with the macro setting, which is excellent for showing the details of fur and whiskers.

Guinea pigs are somewhat ludicrous animals. It's hard to imagine how they could have evolved, given that their main purpose seems to be to squeak loudly and bumble around. But we love our three very much.

We spent most of the daylight hours today in town, buying clothes - cords for me, jeans for both of us and - finally! - new tracksuit trousers to replace my aged and ragged ones. It took a while to find any which were warm, decent and black, but BhS finally provided some for only £12, which seems pretty cheap.

I'm not so thrilled about the jeans, since they serve to prove that irritating quotation about it being difficult to have both a finely honed mind and a finely honed body. Postgraduate study is bad for both one's physical fitness and the fit of one's jeans. (These ones are the same size as my old ones according to the label, but in a more forgiving cut.)

I've always found buying jeans frustrating, but it's even more annoying when I know that if I'd kept up my maintenance efforts successfully, I wouldn't need to be doing this. But there's no point in dwelling on it. I don't have much time at the moment, and weight loss is not top priority, and there's no way it can be. When I finish this degree, I will get back to it. In the meantime, well, I need to wear something.

The piggies don't worry about their weight. If you're a guinea pig, you're supposed to be rounded.

Skin of teeth

OK, this is going to be very brief because (as Mum noted in her comment to my last entry) I had another very busy day. When I came home I was exhausted, and after tea decided to have an early bath. I didn't switch the computer on, got into bed, and completely forgot about blogging until 11.50.

So there we go. The big news of the day is that our digital camera arrived today, but we haven't tested it out yet (see above).

I imagine that once we do, you will see some pictures of guinea pigs.

50 minutes to midnight

It's been an up-and-down kind of day. J went to work, without too much OCD checking, but was very tired and down when he came home, and later in the evening had a slight strop over doing his homework for his new therapist. He's only seen her twice, and she does give him a lot to do outwith the sessions. There's a table analysing his negative thoughts, and a sort of diary of what he's done each day (including the time spent doing OCD checking), and an exercise where you try not to think of a pink rabbit. And some more stuff, but I can't remember the details.

In a way this is good, because we, rather than the taxpayer, are paying for the sessions, and we want the therapist to get the information she needs quickly, so they can make the best use of the sessions. On the other hand, I can see why he quails at the thought of filling in a table with percentages every time he has a negative thought - wouldn't you? Then again, I WANT him to fill in the stupid tables. We do not have an unlimited budget for this, and it is imperative that he engages with the process right from the start. Which means, as far as I can see, providing the information on his moods that is asked for.

So I stropped back, and he did the tables, but I am feeling not very noble, and also that you're not supposed to have to tell 28-year-olds to do their homework.

The guinea pigs are sweet and squeaky. And fluffy. Brownie came and sat on J in a successful attempt to get him feeling phlegmatic enough to tackle the tables.

I am still trying to catch up on work for my course after having been ill, which isn't putting me in the best of moods. The world suddenly seems to be full of wondrous activities which I could be doing if only I could get the course over with.

Sorry if I sound gloomy. I'm not, really; but I'm trying to give an honest run-down on the day with these daily posts. The general stropping is over. J has gone to bed, and I shall follow him shortly, and tomorrow will be another day.