Well, I guess I know why they used to call it ‘confinement.’

I worked all the way through my  pregnancy–up until last week. Now I am at home waiting for the impending birth to strike me like a thief in the night. I was very uncomfortable at work, which I didn’t anticipate. I can see why I really do need to stay home.

But I don’t like being at home much either. The main advantage is that I get to lay down a lot.

There is a kind of list of all the things that hurt. Currently, I have a raging case of carpal tunnet. how ironic! Carpal tunnet sets in with a vengeance once I give up the desk job for laying around at home.  Turns out that some women get swollen ankles when they are pregnant, and some get swollen carpal tunnels that squeeze all feeling out of my right obscene finger particularly. And  which send big achey ouches up my forearms. While I’m sleeping. Which wakes me up. Practice for the sleep deprivation to come, everyone tells me.

I got some wrist braces, which stop the numbness and pain in my arms. That’s good. But it creates a still significant but slightly lesser pain at the base of my thumb. Well, it’s better than nothing.

I went to the library to get more books. Books are good to have at a time like this.  I thought i would take my own advice froma previous blogpost and get some more pulitzer prize winning books.

My town library SUCKS. I printed out the list of pulitzer winning books, and hobbled through the library looking for them. I swear, I only found about 3 of the dozen I looked for. If a library can’t even stock big prize-winning books..what are those librarians in charge of purchasing doing?

Books I have read recently:

• Martian Chronicles by Bradbury
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
• A House Made of Dawn by Momaday

That last one was a pulitzer winner, and it annoyed me a little. It was very ‘different.’ I guess that it wanted to tell the story with as little dialogue or  revealing teh motivation of the characters as possible. The very last section finally made it worthwhile, and i guess I’m glad I read it. But you know…’experimental’ was not what I wanted.

I want a book I can dive into and swim around in. a nice long page turner.

Stupid library has devoted the entire perimeter of fiction section to mystery, western, sci fi, and probably romance. Let me just say, that I can enjoy such things, but not the kind that would get placed in the section devoted to them.Gah! Libraries!! lowest common denominator is all fine unless you are a prime number.

I need some prime books to read. They are getting harder to come by, AND they are often depressing.  Eh.

So, I still have A Death in the Family by Agee and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union to get through. Oh, wait. I picked up one by Silko..I read some of his short stories, and they were pretty good. I’ll start on that one first.

But today, I am recovering from a cold. So, I have to adjust my plans down even further. In addition to all the usual pregnancy woes, I have weakness and a little bit of a runny nose.

We plan on going to the hospital and ‘pre-admitting’. The hospital admits taht they have a huge amount of paperwork that must be filled out before admitting a woman in labor. So, they thoughtfully allow pre-registering in advance of the actual onset of labor. I don’t know how long we’ll be there, but it will be good to have that done.

That might be all I can manage to accomplish today. I’l like to do some laundry and cleaning.  But..i am not who I usually am.

Perhaps I can preaddress the envelopes that we will use to send the birth announcements. It depends.

Yesterday it rained. It started around midnight and kept going.

Chris loves weather, so he actually woke me up at 12:15 AM to tell me it was raining. It kept raining until I drove to work. And then it rained all day.

When I can home again, the rain had slacked a little. Chris came out and joined the dogjoy at my arrival.

Chris is more subtle about welcoming me home. Usually it’s “I’m busy, I can’t talk.”

“But I just got home, can’t you give me a kiss?”

“I’m in the middle of placing orders, and if I stop I’ll lose my place. I”m trying to get work done!”

okay fine. He does work hard. So I leave him alone and go back to watch something on Tivo. Just exactly the time I get involved in a show, he comes and joins me. Not to kiss me, he sits across from me and tells me all his troubles. Hugh Laurie on House is paused in a strange face and my husband is telling me about the contentious alliances between the ship manufacturers. It’s a very reliable occurance.

But not yesterday. He came to see, because he was concerned about the dog.

“It looks like the rain has let up. I should take the dog for a walk now.”

“That’s a good idea…”

“Then when we come back, we should give her a bath. She’ll be a little wet anyway.”

So he went to walk the dog, and I had to prepare for the bath. Not much to prepare, really. Just get towels out. I got the towels and then had a snack. By the time I was done with my snack, the rain was pouring.

I thought maybe I should get the car and go find them to get them out of the rain at that point. But I didn’t know where they’d gone. So I waited.

Chris came in with the dog and handed me the leash. “Take her into the bathroom right now, I don’t want her dripping everywhere.”

Now, we have a system for bathing the dog. Fill the tub with warm, but not too warm, water; have towels handy for drying her off; then strip down to our underwear so that we can get halfway in the tub to wash her. Chris does her body, and I do her head and am responsible for keeping the water fresh and the rinse cups for both of us filled.

Lucy Dog is no dummy. When she sees both of us in the middle of the day in our underwear, she knows something is up and it’s time to run.

But we didn’t have time to get stripped to our underwear, and she was already in the bathroom, wet from the rain and wearing her leash. Not something that had every happened before; she wasn’t sure of the protocol. I quickly started running some bathwater and took my clothes off. Chris was putting his wet things out to dry somewhere in the house and he got down to his underwear and joined us.

Lucy saw both of us in our underwear and got the idea. She jumped in the tub.

It was easier to wash her in her pre-moistened state. Good thing, because we’d gone too long without washing her and she was very dirty. She’d been in a state I call “Filthmuzzle” for at least a week.

Afterwards, she jumped out, shook herself mightily and ran around the whole house to dry herself. We’ve learned to lay a towel down on the rug, and she will rub herself across it to dry off.

Now she looks very pretty and curly. No more filthmuzzle.

Last week, I got my piano moved out of the kitchen and into its home against the interior living room wall. We had to get a pro to do it, and use special weight distributing cups under the piano wheel so that this heavy thing does not leave long scars in the ancient floor wood of our living room.

I can see the whole blessed piano from the dining table and while lying down on the couch. It had a thickish coat of grimy dust on it from being so near the stove which cooks our hamurger meat. I lovingly washed it with Murphy’s Wood Soap. I needed the grease to be really cleaned off it before I got to the real prize:

Polishing the wood

I have put so much work and love into that worthless piano, and I love love love to see the wood that I uncovered by my sweat, blood and tears shine like a redeemed life. I use Solid Gold furniture polish (I would link to it, but the internet is not on speaking terms with that brand). I rubbed and shined the oily redemption on my gorgeous instrument until I could see every grainy swirl of the proud tree it once was.

I plugged the piano lamp in to shed light and stood back. Yes, that’s my piano. Beautiful. About a million years ago, when I finally put the finish coat on my piano and saw the color it became, I determined that the piano was the color that I wish my hair was: a shimmering multi-faceted auburn that licked out like flame.

Maybe I was high from the fumes of the chemicals. But when I put the love-polish on my instrument, it ignites the flame every time.

THEN I found my fake book and played a few tunes. My fingers were weak from not playing since…oh…forever or February, which is when we refinished the floors in the house and when it was relagated to the kitchen. The piano also needs a tuning. Middle ‘D’ is quite dissonant. Hard to avoid middle ‘D’. It’s a popular and useful key.

I’ve been longing to play my piano, and I spent some time on it. I think I’ll try to at least touch the keys every day. Making music is a joy that I should not neglect. Since Chris has his finished office now, I can play and make mistakes without bothering anyone.

I like to play and sing. One thing I enjoy doing is taking a well-known song and reinterpreting it to my own style.

I just heard a great duet reinterpretation, and I’ll share it all with you here:

Last time I washed the cat was right before we moved into our little house. He suffered a tail injury-perhaps it was merely a tail indignation-which required a midnight trip to the vet and much concern.

We figured that Cat would never be bathed again.

But he is fat, and lazy, and not so good about grooming. He was accumulating dirt on his catskin like sand. He spends a lot of time laying down, and I figured he couldn’t be comfortable with the grit rubbing against his hide. I nerved myself up to bathe Cat.  Chris was sick, so I had to do it alone.

He took it better than expected. No scratching or biting, just several attempts at escape. In the end, he lay down in the tub and yowled as I doused him with water and rubbed him with Chris’s Pert. That made it hard to wash his tummy, but I did my best. Brown streams of water came off him.

I raised him out of the tub wrapped in a towel and held him until his panicked breathing slowed a little. He’s such a fat cat I had some fear of him having a stroke or something. But he at last calmed down and began licking his paws. I left a clean, dry towel on the floor to help with the drying process.

Lucy Dog came over to inspect. Cat smelled funny now; he didn’t used to smell like Pert. Lucy really wanted to help Cat by licking, but she knew that Cat had never tolerated such impudence. She stood over the grooming cat with her tongue slightly out, showing moral support I guess.

It’s been three days since the bath, and he loves to lay on the towel. It’s his now. He is a pleasure to pet and proud of his shiny coat. We can tell he is proud because he slits his eyes and blinks with buddha-like satsifaction. I think this bath proves that we could do it again if necessary.